


Thank You For Your Cooperation

by AuthorAuthor



Series: War Is The Father [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: (It's Marvel - No One Ever Actually Dies), Actual Violence, BAMF Natasha Romanov, But It's Not Canon Compliant In Other Ways As Well, Canon Divergence - Thor: The Dark World, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Don't Worry About The Cat! The Cat Is Going To Be Fine, Frigga Lives, I mean it IS an AU, Illusory Violence, Loki Does What Frigga Wants, Loki Does What He Wants, Not Canon Compliant, Some Psychological Trauma/Horror, Temporary Character Death, Warning: Loki
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-04 07:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 69,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5325314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorAuthor/pseuds/AuthorAuthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dr. Jane Foster opens a trans dimensional portal in London and promptly disappears through it, Natasha Romanov and the other Avengers are called in to help Thor find her. One unplanned trip to Asgard later, they’re back on Earth and saddled with a God of Lies who’s been stripped of his magic, plus a pressing need to stop Malekith and his Dark Elves before the All-Father can step in and interfere.</p>
<p>But even after some strong words from his mother (who isn’t <i>angry</i>, just <i>very disappointed</i>) Loki is still keeping secrets. There’s no doubt about it, the Avengers can’t trust him. </p>
<p>But hey… Natasha hasn’t trusted anyone since she left Department X, so why would that be a problem?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Long before the birth of light, there was darkness. And from that darkness came the Dark Elves._

_Millennia ago, the most ruthless of their kind, Malekith, sought to turn the universe back into one of eternal night. Such evil was possible through the power of the Aether, an ancient force of infinite destruction._

_The noble armies of Asgard, led by Bor, waged a mighty war against the Dark Elves. As the nine worlds converged above him, Malekith sought to unleash the Aether - but Asgard ripped the weapon from his grasp. Without it, the Dark Elves fell._

_With the battle all but lost Malekith sacrificed his own people in a desperate attempt to lay waste to Asgard’s army, but in vain. Malekith was vanquished; the Aether was hidden; and the Nine Realms were secure once more._

_Well._

_Secure for a given value of ‘secure’._

_The problem with hiding ancient forces of infinite destruction is that ancient forces of infinite destruction tend to want to be found._

_And, being infinite, they are very, very good at waiting._

_The World Tree grows. The Wheel of History turns. And what was once hidden, will be found…_

//

Heimdall the Observer, guardian of Asgard and keeper of the Bifrost, could hear the sound made by a sapling bursting forth from its seed. He could see the pulse fluttering in the throat of a squirrel half a universe away. His powers allowed him to see and hear as far as creation, but he did not need to use those powers now to be aware of the tread of footsteps behind him on the Rainbow Bridge.

“You’re late.”

He heard Thor chuckle ruefully. “Merriment can sometimes be a heavier burden than battle.”

“Then you’re doing one of them incorrectly.”

“Perhaps.” He paused. “How fare the stars?”

Heimdall smiled to himself. The Prince of Asgard was all but bursting with the question he truly wished to ask, and yet here he was, spending his breath in polite conversation. He decided to play along.

“Still shining.” He stepped down from the dais and thrust the sword Hofund into its holder. Sections of the Observatory began to spin and move, golden spirals and cogs rotating about one another in a thin mimicry of the nebulae and galaxies that danced above their heads. “Do you recall what I taught you of the Convergence?”

The lecturing tone came naturally to him. Years ago, both the princes of Asgard had been under his tutelage. He remembered Thor as an apt pupil, obedient and attentive when he believed in the value of what he was being taught. In that he had been very unlike his brother, who had been impatient and quarrelsome, eager to draw his teachers into disputes – until, that is, he had learned watchfulness, and had drawn secrecy around himself like a cloak. It was difficult to say which was worse.

“Yes. The alignment of the worlds. It approaches, does it not?”

“The universe hasn’t seen this marvel since before my watch began. Few can sense it. Even fewer can see it.” His voice trailed away as he allowed himself to turn his eyes towards the visions that he alone could see: nine realms turning to their own rhythms, drawn momentarily into synch. “But while its effects can be dangerous, it is truly beautiful…”

Obedient, Thor turned his gaze towards the stars. “I see nothing.”

Heimdall’s smile broadened. “Or perhaps that is not the beauty you seek,” he hinted, taking pity on his prince.

Thor did not deny it, although he did look sheepish as he gave in and asked the question that had been on his mind even before he had set foot in the Observatory: “How is she?”

“She’s quite clever, your mortal,” Heimdall admitted, bending his gaze towards Midgard. Nine realms and ten trillion souls, and the heart of the Prince of Asgard beat for only one. “She doesn’t know it yet, but she studies the Convergence as well. Even now -.” He stopped

Thor took a step forwards, immediately alert. “What is it?”

“I can’t see her.”

//


	2. Chapter 2

_Jane is in her lab._

_She’s sure it’s her lab. It couldn’t be anywhere else. All of her stuff is here, right to hand, whenever she wants it._

_Which… is kind of weird, actually. Jane isn’t really an organized person, she mostly subscribes to the ‘put it wherever’ system of filing, and the fact that she hasn’t had to spend any time at all digging frantically through discarded take-out containers, scientific journals and stacks of print-outs to find what she needs is… unusual, to say the least._

_Uncanny, almost._

_But it is her lab. She would recognize it anywhere. It’s exactly like it’s always been, except that it’s somehow hard to focus on anything farther away than her lab bench. When she looks up at the Richard Feynman poster on the far wall, it’s like it’s obscured by white fog, or smoke, except it doesn’t smell like smoke, and she doesn’t like to look at it. That’s really weird, actually, and she’s surprised she wasn’t alarmed by it earlier, but now she can feel her chest starting to constrict and she’s breathing faster and –_

_The research, the man standing behind her prompts._

_Right. The_ research _. Jane’s attention shifts back to the device in front of her._

_It’s fascinating. It looks so simple, but it’s light-years ahead of anything she’s seen on Earth, and Jane feels the familiar bubble of excitement run through her as she thinks about how she’s so, so lucky to have been born now, in time to see Einstein-Rosen Bridges popping up in New Mexico and portals opening to other worlds, and now this brilliant, fascinating device that she can’t wait to take apart and really understand._

_It’s amazing._

_If there is anything you need, it will be provided, the man says._

_“Thank you,” Jane says. “I really appreciate that,” and hopes that it will make up for the fact that she can’t for the life of her remember who he is._

//


	3. Chapter 3

Deep below the palace, Asgard's prisons glowed with golden light.

“Odin continues to bring me new friends. How _thoughtful_.”

The view through the golden lattice of the cell wall was fragmentary, but Loki didn’t need to see them to know who Asgard’s latest prisoners were. Even through the wall he could hear the clank of chains, the thud of thick boots and the discontented grumbling of captured Marauders. He fancied that he could even smell them: the rich stink of sweat, leather and old blood, the aftermath of routes and sorties that had been fought without him.

Frigga didn't look up from her work. “Do the books I send not interest you?”

She (or rather, her projection: physical visitors were forbidden to him, but it would take more than locked doors or Odin’s will to stop Frigga from going where she willed) was seated in a scroll-armed chair that habitually belonged in her chambers. Her lap was spread with folds of rich, green-dyed cloth, which she was embroidering with golden thread.

The books she spoke of lay in stacks on the floor, the scanty furniture of the cell not extending to shelves. They arrived on the trays that carried his meals and he collected them in piles according to a vague organizational system of his own. Some he looked into, flipping the pages open at random, but mostly they stayed where he left them. Reading, he felt, would look too much like contentment. He did not want to look content.

Instead, he paced.

“Is that how I am to while away eternity? With reading?”

“I have done everything in my power to make you comfortable.” She drew back the needle, pulling her thread taut. “If reading bores you, I can suggest other pastimes.”

“How kind of you.” He watched her work, her deft hands manipulating thread and cloth with a surety born of eons of practise. “Does Odin share your concern? Does Thor?” He threw himself down on his couch and tucked his arms under his head. “It must be so _inconvenient_ , them asking after me day and night.”

He waited a beat, then turned his head to see her reaction – but there was none. Just the same half-smile, the same push-and-pull of needle and thread.

“You know full well that it is by your actions that you are here.”

“ _My_ actions? I was merely giving truth to the lie I’d been told my entire life: that I was born to be a king.”

The accustomed bitterness rose in him like oil. He expected a flat denial, but instead:

“You were. You _are_.” As he digested this, she finished a stitch and turned over the frame in which she had stretched the fabric. “A _true_ king admits his faults.”

The sting of it made him bolt to his feet, although he should have anticipated it. It was typical of her: the soft flattery, followed by a sharp corrective. At such times she reminded him of her cats, all smooth fur and inviting elegance until they unsheathed their claws and left you clutching a bloodied hand.

What were the _faults_ he was supposed to admit to?, he demanded savagely inside his own head. His methods may have been faulty, but everything he had done had been right in _principal_. Asgard's entire history was one of war. Of what importance were a mere handful of deaths compared to eons of blood shed on the battlefield?

Scowling, he strode to the front of his cell and stared broodingly out into the corridor, but the golden lattice got in the way. He ended up watching his mother instead. She had come to the end of her golden thread and she drew out the small pair of scissors that she wore on a chain around her neck to cut off the excess.

“Aren’t you ever going to be finished that thing?” he demanded, peevish.

“Someday.” She loosened the screws on the frame and pulled another section of fabric into place. Loki craned his neck to get a better look, his curiosity getting the better of him. He had never been allowed to see the work in its entirety, only fragments as she worked away at it.

“What is it, anyways?” Her eyes were on her work, not him, and so he crept forwards. “Who is it for?”

He reached out to rest his hand on the back of her chair and it – the chair, the cloth, and Frigga herself – vanished in a shower of golden sparks.

She reappeared in the far corner of the room with not a hair out of place. “It is to be a surprise,” she said with dignity. “Now, if you’re _quite_ finished behaving foolishly?”

She said it as though colour-coding their children _hadn’t_ been one of the All-Mother and All-Father’s less ridiculous child-raising schemes. The cloth was green and the thread was gold, and therefore it _had_ to be for him that she was making it. The thought cheered him up, and went some ways towards unknitting the tight knot that had been forming inside his chest ever since their paths had crossed in the throne room after he had been dragged back to Asgard in chains.

Content, he settled back down onto the couch and drew up his feet so he was sitting cross-legged, grasping his ankles.

“Thor must be keeping busy,” he remarked as another cohort of Marauders was led past the cell. One of the guards accompanying them had a blonde moustache and the other was very fat. If they had looked inside his cell they would have seen him alone, seemingly speaking to the empty air: but Loki deliberately did not turn his head, and so he didn’t know if they looked or not. “You can’t have seen much of him since his return.”

“Actually, your brother has gone back to Midgard,” Frigga said, unexpectedly.

He stiffened. “To Midgard? Why?”

“I don’t know. He said nothing to me about it.” As Loki brooded over this piece of intelligence, she carefully twisted the cut end of her thread and rethreaded her needle. “It will be pleasant for him to see his friends again.”

“Friends!” He snorted. “Thor doesn’t have _friends_ on Midgard. If they hadn’t had _me_ to keep them busy, he would have been the one in their glass fish bowl.”

“Come now. You’re being cynical. And perhaps he will have the leisure to visit his Jane Foster, this time.”

Loki lifted his eyebrows. “Are you _really_ pleased with the prospect of having a mortal daughter-in-law?”

“She makes him happy,” Frigga said simply. As she resumed her stitching, she added: “It wouldn’t be for very long, anyways.”

“Now who’s being cynical?”

Frigga smiled, but kept her eyes on her work. Loki’s attention drifted away once more, onto familiar channels.

“The _Avengers_ ,” he brooded. “What nonsense. What _arrogance_. What in the Nine Realms are they supposed to be avenging, anyways?”

“They are Midgard’s champions, and they deserve our respect.” Frigga’s tone became ironic. “ _Especially_ yours.”

“They’re a joke!” Loki snapped, nettled. “A child’s idea of an army! Break them down, and what are they? A mortal man with a metal heart, a relic from a dead age, and an abomination that refuses to recognize its own strength.”

“You’re always so perceptive, Loki.” He looked sharply at her but there was nothing but the most perfect placidity in her expression. She tilted her head to one side to gauge the effect of her embroidery and smiled to herself, apparently pleased. “… And what else?”

“What do you mean?” he demanded, disconcerted by the question. Did she expect some sort of self-reflection from him? Whatever her game was, he wouldn’t play.

“I thought there were more of them than just the three,” she said, and he relaxed.

“The others aren’t important. Just ordinary mortals. Though the archer was… useful.” He chewed absently at a hangnail as he reflected. “More so than one would expect. Even he doesn’t give himself enough credit as a tactician, I think.”

“Don’t bite your nails,” his mother said severely, and he scowled and jammed his hand under a cushion. “And? Isn’t there someone else?”

His scowl deepened. “Don’t pretend. You know very well there is.”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“You ask about her _every time_.”

“Of course I take an interest. These lady warriors are a novelty to me. We didn’t have anything like them when I was a girl. I always ask after Sif, don’t I?”

Loki’s scowl was in danger of becoming permanently etched onto his face. “Don’t talk to me about Sif.”

“Well, of course I won’t _now_.” She paused to unpick a knot that had appeared in her thread. “There wouldn’t be any sense in it, since she hasn’t been to see you since you were imprisoned.”

Loki gritted his teeth.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” he said, enunciating the name with exaggerated care, “is an automaton. A machine. She is a weapon, to be aimed and fired by anyone with enough wit to find the trigger. Even the archer is afraid of her, although at least he feels badly about it.”

Frigga lifted her eyes from her embroidery. “You’re being unkind.”

“It’s the truth. He knows her heart better than anyone, and I,” – he grinned, a flash of teeth that had very little humour in it and even less pleasure, “- know his.”

She sighed. “Poor child. It must be difficult for her, living so far from home, and among strangers. I expect she has made some friends, but it’s never the same as the people whom you've grown up with.”

“Mm,” said Loki, not really listening. Unconscious of his mother’s critical eye he raised his hand and, without thinking, began to chew his nail again.

He heard a small click as Frigga set down her embroidery frame.

“Well,” she said, beginning to gather together her scissors and needles preparatory to leaving. “So those are Midgard’s defenders. I can’t say that they sound so _very_ formidable.” Scraps of cut thread littered the lap of her skirt. She picked them up one by one between her thumb and forefinger, and rolled them together. “Not when, as you say, you break them down.”

“N-o,” he agreed. Inside his head, the wheels were turning. “Not when you break them down...”

//


	4. Chapter 4

Once upon a time, on a red-eye flight back to Washington D.C. when he had been pretending to be someone else, Clint Barton had been seated next to a talkative little old lady who had insisted on telling him all about the first time she had flown on an airplane. Back then, people had considered it an event. The men wore ties, and the ladies put on their best dresses, and the children got little model airplanes to play with. It had been something to look forwards to.

“Not like nowadays,” she said, and sighed over the half-sized plastic cup of ginger ale the flight attendant had handed her.

Clint agreed with her. Flying just wasn’t _fun_ anymore. He still got a bit of a thrill sometimes, when he could look out the window of the cockpit on a clear day and see the world laid out underneath of him, with the tiny cars beetling back and forth on roads that were thin as a hair and the tiny, brilliant, postage-stamp swimming pools laid out behind the houses in the swankier neighbourhoods, all of it real, all of it _alive_ in a way that a map or a photo could never be. But for the most part the romance of flying was gone for him, especially when he found himself, as he did now, wedged into what was basically a poorly-ventilated tin can preparing to be hurtled across the Atlantic Ocean in the company of a dozen other over-dressed men, at least one of whom hadn’t put on deodorant that morning.

People used to be allowed to smoke on airplanes, too. The only time Clint had ever smoked on an airplane, he had been on fire.

Still, until SHIELD finished building their teleportation machine (and Clint didn’t care what that Fitz kid told him, he _knew_ that was what was in the sealed lab room in subbasement C), a jet was the fastest way to get from Washington D.C. to London, England, so they were all just going to have to make the best of things.

Really, he supposed he should be grateful they were letting him on a plane in the first place.

Even with the ramp down, the belly of the jet was dark and airless. Red lights shone over the benches that ran on either side of the hold as the members of the Special-Ops squad he was travelling with stowed their equipment and prepared for take-off. He had worked alongside a few of them in the past and a couple of them had nodded to him when he had boarded the plane, but mostly their attention was on each other as they chatted or double-checked their gear.

Clint looked down at the tangle of buckles and webbing he was supposed to be strapping himself in with and tried not to feel self-conscious. The Special-Ops guys were each kitted out with a flak-jacket, black combat boots, and a utility belt covered with loops and pouches. They jangled when they walked from all the gear they had clipped to themselves, so that it would be within reach in an emergency: flashlights, flares, whistles, grappling hooks, safety matches, parachute cord, the whole kit and caboodle.

Clint had a vest and a case under his seat that held his bow and arrows. He felt seriously underdressed.

He also couldn’t get his harness untangled. He frowned at the mess in his hands. Now, if _that_ strap was attached to _this_ buckle, he should just have to pull it through this loop, aaand…

Nope. Now it was inside-out.

“Need a hand?”

Clint jumped, startled, and then grinned sheepishly, embarrassed by his overreaction. “Hi, Nat.” Obediently, he passed her the harness. “I didn’t see your name on the flight manifest."

Though he would never admit it, he was grateful for the surprise. It had saved him from the worst part of seeing her: the moment of uncertainty before she met his eyes, when he didn’t know if she was the Natasha who knew him or not.

They had gone undercover together a few times over the years, and Clint had spent every second of those missions being miserable. He hated being given a cover: he barely knew how to be Clint Barton A.K.A. Hawkeye, so pretending to be Clinton Barrington, Heir to an Oil Fortune, or Clyde Barrow, Hitman For Hire, put him farther out of his depths than he was even close to being comfortable with. The clothes never fit, he never knew what to say, and he felt like people were _laughing_ at him all the time.

For Natasha, though, it was easy. She could slip on another identity as easily as slipping on the catsuit she wore on Black Ops missions (which, he didn’t know how she did _that_ , either), and seeing that, watching her become Natalie Rushman, or Nicole Russo… frankly, it scared the shit out of Clint. Especially now, when there was the additional fear that, one day, he’d look into her eyes – eyes that didn’t recognize him, eyes that looked right _through_ him – and see, deep in the retina, a tiny flash of blue…

With an effort he wrenched his mind back to the here and now and hastily buried the thought before she could see it. "I like your hair,” he added.

She had dyed it again. Not for the first time he wondered why, if she was going to go to all that trouble, she always chose _red_.

“Thanks.” But her smile, although it was bright, looked false, and it did nothing to smooth away the faint line between her eyes. Something was wrong.

She untwisted the harness with a few deft turns of her hands and tossed it into his lap.

“Thanks.” He slipped it on as she sat down next to him on the bench. She had her full Black Widow outfit on, with the cuffs and the belt and everything, and she looked as perfectly put together as she always did, but there was a grim set to her mouth as she fastened the buckles with unnecessary force. “Is everything… okay?”

“Of _course_ everything’s okay,” she said, yanking hard on a strap to tighten it. “Why _wouldn’t_ everything be okay? I only found _out_ about this mission by hacking SHIELD’s internal communications, after all!”

“You _hacked_ –.” A look from her told him that he was talking too loudly and he dropped his voice to a whisper. “You hacked _SHIELD_?!”

“Not _all_ of it.” She sounded irritated, as though it should have been obvious. “Only Steve’s deployment schedules.”

A few heads turned as Clint’s voice rose to a squeak. “You hacked _Captain America_?!”

Natasha frowned. “I wanted to keep an eye on him. If he doesn’t have a mission to go on he just mopes around D.C. like the world’s saddest, loneliest Labrador retriever puppy. Did you know he visits his own exhibit at the Smithsonian? _Frequently_?”

“I didn’t know that.” Clint tried to think back to the last time he had seen Steve Rogers. Once in a while he could be seen around the Triskelion, keeping as low a profile as possible for a six-foot something man in a babydoll t-shirt, but Clint had never really talked to the guy out of uniform. He felt badly about it now, but hey. He had stuff going on too.

“Anyways, if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have known that Dr. Foster was missing. I wasn't even cc’d on it.”

Clint knew her well enough to recognize that she was seriously pissed off by this. He tried to smooth things over. “Maybe they thought you were busy. Or still in the field, or something.”

Natasha was unimpressed. “I was at a _dentist’s_ appointment.

“Ah.” No wonder she had been combing through Captain America’s e-mails looking for a distraction. “Still, isn’t this kind of – small potatoes for you? Dr. Foster got lost in an old building in London. She probably just fell into an empty well or something.”

Natasha quirked a skeptical eyebrow at him, and finished strapping herself in.

The preparations inside the jet were almost complete. All the equipment and personnel were stowed away or strapped down, and the field commander in charge of the squad was making his way down the benches, checking names off his clipboard. His eyes flickered over Clint without a pause, but he halted in front of Natasha. He frowned.

“I thought this was a search-and-rescue mission,” he said.

Natasha was smiling, and not in a good way. “It _is_ , yes.” Her tone suggested that she was praising him for completing a difficult trick. Clint groaned inwardly. This sort of thing was the reason why none of the normal agents would sit with them in the cafeteria.

Well. It was _one_ of the reasons.

Shouts came from outside as the ground crew cleared the runway. One of them must have given the pilot the all-clear because the ramp began to lift. The noise the engines were making rose in pitch as they prepared to give it their all.

“No hostiles were reported in the area,” the field commander persisted. “We don’t even have authorization to use lethal force.”

“I don’t believe we do, no,” Natasha agreed.

The field commander’s frown deepened as he continued to look from Natasha to his clipboard and back again. He appeared genuinely confused. “So what are _you_ doing here?”

//

The jet had barely touched the ground in London before Natasha was out and storming across the pavement, leaving Clint scrambling to keep up.

“Aw, Nat, hey, wait up!”

The mission site was an abandoned factory. One warehouse in particular was the center of most of the activity, with agents were running in and out carrying pieces of scientific equipment or speaking urgently into their earpieces. A group of SHIELD scientists in white lab coats were clustered around a stack of up-ended shipping containers, waving their clipboards around in the air and arguing. Natasha charged straight through them, scattering them like pigeons.

“Come on, it was an honest question. He just wanted to know why you weren’t on the flight manifest, that’s all!”

She slowed down enough to shoot him a piercing glare.

“ _You_ were on the flight manifest,” she said accusingly. “ _You_ got this mission.”

He took her by the elbow and drew her out of the way of a pair of junior agents who were trying to untangle a long, thick electrical cord.

“What, like that’s a _good_ thing? I’m their go-to guy when it comes to sitting on rooftops staring at nothing, remember? It’s on my resume, under ‘Relevant Skills’. Come on, Nat,” he wheedled as she showed signs of softening, “this is kids’ stuff. It’s below your pay grade. This is a time-killer for me, alright? They haven’t given me back my full clearance yet.” He tried not to sound bitter. “This kind of thing is all I _can_ do.”

Natasha stopped walking and looked hard at him. He tried to stay cool under her scrutiny, like it didn’t bother him at all, and he thought he did pretty well. He only chewed his lip a _little_ bit, and if he tasted blood, so what? His lips were dry. His skin was thin. It was probably a vitamin deficiency. Or something.

Natasha’s expression relaxed. She smiled, looking more like her usual self.

“Come on," she said, and it was her turn to take him by the arm. "Let’s get out of the way of this clown show.”

//

There was a loading dock around the back of the building. It led into a large room, empty except for an old cement truck. The doorways leading from it were draped with plastic sheets, through which filtered the distant sounds of the SHIELD agents investigating the rest of the building.

Clint cocked his head to one side, listening hard. One voice in particular cut through the hum of activity like a buzz saw, and though he couldn't make out the words, he thought he recognized the mile-a-minute delivery.

"Does that sound like Tony Stark to you?" he asked. He shook his head. "Man, that guy would've made a great auctioneer."

He leaned against the wall, enjoying the quiet and the open space. Natasha joined him.

“I have relevant skills too," she muttered. She kicked at a loose piece of concrete.

Clint looked at her, puzzled, It wasn't like her to be hung up on something as insignificant as the opinions of some generic Special-Ops guy.

“Of _course_ you do,” he assured her. “But maybe you could have explained that in a way that _didn’t_ involve knocking the field commander on his ass and threatening to tase him with his own stun-gun?”

Natasha scowled, and for a second he thought he was going to be the next one to get knocked on his ass – but then her shoulders slumped.

“Maybe.” She wrinkled her nose, but she was smiling. “Also, was it just me, or was one of those guys not wearing deodorant?”

“I _know_ , right?!” Clint exclaimed. “I mean – you’re going to be sealed in a pressurized cabin with a dozen other people, show some _consideration_ , man!” She laughed, and he grinned at her. He liked her laugh. It made him feel light and kind of tingly inside, sort of like champagne, except that he didn’t actually like champagne. Alcohol, in Clint’s opinion, shouldn’t have _bubbles_.

“Why did you want to come along so badly, anyways?” he risked asking. “I didn’t think the Black Widow would be scared of going to the _dentist_.”

This was a lie. SHIELD’s dentist was a stick-thin woman of indeterminate age with a glare that could strip paint off walls. She was _terrifying,_ but then again, she had to be. Her day-to-day life involved sticking sharp objects into the mouths of people with lighting-fast reflexes and serious trust issues. Her predecessor had left after being pinned to the ceiling tiles with his own dental picks.

“It wasn’t _that_ ,” Natasha protested, half-heartedly. She pushed herself away from the wall and went to examine a piece of the plastic sheeting that hung over the door frame. “It’s just – Dr. Foster is missing. That makes it Avenger’s business.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “So, what, you're expecting Thor to turn up next?”

“Fury certainly thinks so.” She had picked up a corner of the plastic sheet and was examining it closely, but when he looked questioningly at her she looked up and met his eyes. “The crates? On the plane?”

Clint’s mind raced. The Special-Ops team _had_ loaded some black crates onto the plane. He remembered that it had taken two men to carry each of them, so they were heavy – they had looked familiar too, where had he seen them before? Not in the Triskelion, but on the helicarrier, that was it, he had seen similar crates on the helicarrier, when –

The penny dropped. The Phase-Two prototypes. “But he said they weren’t authorized to use lethal force!”

“Maybe they aren’t expected to be lethal.” She had lost interest in the plastic sheet and was walking slowly around the perimeter of the room. “It probably takes a lot to kill an Asgardian.”

Clint saw her stoop to pick something up off the ground. He looked down at the ground too, as though doing so would give him some sort of insight into what she was looking at. But the ground beneath his feet was just cement, with a scattering of dirt and loose rocks over it.

He hunkered down and picked up one of the rocks. “Seems a little unfriendly.” He hefted the stone, testing its weight. “I mean, he’s on our side, isn’t he?”

“He might blame us for losing Dr. Foster.”

“Come on, that’s not our fault. What were we supposed to do, microchip her?” He lined himself up with the cement truck in the middle of the room. The window of the cab was open, and if he put the right amount of spin on it he could ricochet the rock off the side-mirror, and right into the front seat. “Actually, I bet Fury wishes he had…”

He drew back his arm. Before he could throw the stone, Natasha grabbed his wrist.

“ _Don’t_.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because,” she said. “There are _kids_ in there.”

Clint stared at her, his mouth open. Before he could speak, he was interrupted by a very annoyed voice from inside the cement truck.

"You weren't supposed to know that!" it exclaimed, aggrieved. A small head, topped by a striped bobble-hat, popped up in the passenger's-side window. "We were _hiding_!"

"Navid!" a second voice hissed, shocked. The small head vanished suddenly from view, as though it had been yanked out of sight. "We're supposed to be being quiet!"

Clint looked from Natasha to the cement truck, and back again. She held up the object she had picked up off the ground. It was the wrapper from one of those yogurt-in-a-tube things, YoGo or GoYo or whatever, and there was a little picture of a cartoon Captain America on it, holding his shield out in front of him like he was charging into battle. It was kind of cute.

"Told you," she said.

//


	5. Chapter 5

Clint liked kids. Granted, he didn’t ever really get a chance to hang out with any, since there was no daycare in the Triskelion because SHIELD didn’t want to put their giant experimental aircrafts and their employees’ children in the same basket, so to speak, but he liked kids. They were, like, the future and stuff.

He liked kids, he reminded himself for the thirtieth time in the past ten minutes, his inner voice maybe shading over into hysteria a little bit. They were just - _really fucking exhausting_.

There turned out to be three of them hiding in the cement truck but it had taken him a while to count them because two out of those three never stood still. Or stopped talking. It seemed incredible that they had managed to stay hidden for so long.

“How did you know we were there?” one of the boys demanded as they climbed down from the cab. He had a blue jacket and very wide eyes that he kept fixed on Natasha.

“I used to be a teacher,” Natasha told him, very seriously, and Clint wondered if she was talking about the SHIELD academy, or the Black Widow program. “You know teachers have eyes on the backs of our heads.”

“You were a teacher? Where?” Blue Jacket asked. “What did you teach?”

She smiled. “Surveillance and hand-to-hand combat.”

“Oh.” He frowned, probably over the word ‘surveillance’, and then his expression cleared. “That’s cool. How come we don’t get to learn anything like that?”

“That’s probably high school,” the other boy reasoned. His green jacket had been left unzipped and it bounced around his waist as he leapt and jumped and swung his arms around. “They probably learn about that stuff in high school. That’s why we have to stay in school, like the doctor lady said.”

Clint and Natasha exchanged a look. Somehow, although he knew Dr. Foster only from hearsay, Clint had a feeling that was _exactly_ the sort of thing she’d say to three truant school-aged kids she had found hanging out in an abandoned factory.

“But school is boring!” Blue Jacket complained, and then remember that Natasha was listening and looked abashed. “I mean, I bet _your_ school is interesting. But ours is boring.”

“‘Interesting’ is one way to put it,” Natasha agreed, straight-faced. “School is very important. I think Doctor Lady is right.”

Green Jacket shoved his sleeve into his mouth to smother a grin. “Doctor Lady isn’t her _name_!” he crowed, vastly amused. “She’s Doctor _Forester_.”

“Doctor Foster,” Blue Jacket corrected, and then pointed at the third member of their trio, who had been standing a little bit off to the side and alternating between staring at Natasha and the ground. “Maddie knows. She liked Maddie. Her and Maddie talked a lot.”

“Maddie’s smart,” Green Jacket volunteered. “She’s going to be an astronaut one day. Or a doctor. Or, like, a doctor, but in _space_.”

“Maddie’s really, really smart,” Blue Jacket agreed. He added, with a shit-eating little grin, “not like _John_. John has to take the _special_ math classes,” and was promptly tackled by Green Jacket yelling “I’m gonna _get_ you for that, Navid, you _jerk_!”

“Hey, _hey_!” Clint yelled, trying to corral the two of them as they ran circles around his legs, yelling and laughing and grabbing at each other’s jackets. “Break it up guys! Guys!”

He managed to get a grip on each of their collars and held them apart at arm’s length as they each tried to land an uncoordinated punch on the other. Despite his best efforts, he was starting to freak out a little. He couldn’t hold them forever and if his childhood with his brother was at all typical, this was going to end in bloody noses and black eyes at best. He couldn’t show up in front of Agent Sitwell and the other SHIELD agents dragging along a couple of bruised and bloodied kids. He _couldn’t_.

“Come on, guys, please!”

“Settle down, boys,” Natasha said and to Clint’s astonishment they did, although John did get in one last good shove when he let go of them. It was something in her voice, he decided. She really did sound like a teacher. Or maybe a librarian, the kind who always knew where to find the book you were looking for, but who’d make you pee your pants a little if you were late returning a book.

“So,” she went on, her eyes on Maddie, “you’re going to be a scientist when you grow up? I bet Dr. Jane Foster was really excited when you told her that.”

“Yeah.” The little girl’s voice was very soft but it grew stronger as she went on. “She’s an _astrophysicist_. She studies _space_.”

“Do you like space?”

“I _love_ space,” she said, so seriously that Clint fought to stifle a laugh. “There’s all sorts of different planets and universes out there that no one’s seen, and it’s all going to need scientists to explore it.”

And if that didn’t come straight from Dr. Foster’s mouth then Clint would eat his exploding arrows. It was just the sort of thing he could imagine coming from the woman who had gone haring off into the New Mexico desert and found a Norse god.

He looked down into Maddie’s open, guileless expression and felt something squeeze inside his chest. He wanted to say something, to warn the kid that those planets and universes were where the Chitauri had come from – hell, _Loki_ was from space. Was Loki from space? Maybe Asgard wasn’t space. Or maybe it was space, but, like, a different kind of space. It didn’t matter. What he was trying to say was, it wasn’t all going to be happy-go-lucky science adventures.

 _Don’t go_ , he thought, a little desperately. _Stay at home. Be safe_.

But it wasn’t as though _home_ was any safer these days, was it?

“So you want to travel through space,” Natasha was saying. “Like an astronaut?” But Maddie shook her head.

“N-no.” She bit her thumb. “Astronauts fly in space shuttles. I don’t like flying.”

“She’s scared of heights,” Navid explained. Clint wondered if he should take the kid to one side and explain that Snitches Get Stitches. It was advice he thought might serve the little guy well in life.

“That might be a problem if you want to go into space. It generally requires at least a little bit of flying. I mean, planets are really far away.”

Maddie, embarrassed, looked away. John jumped in to answer for her.

“Dr. Foster said it won’t! She said that by the time we’re old enough to go to space, no one will need to fly at all anymore!”

“If no one is going to fly, how are they going to get into space? That doesn’t make any sense! You can’t _walk_ into space!” Natasha pretended to scoff, and that was it – the three of them practically fell all over each other in their eagerness to prove her wrong.

It was kind of scary how good she was at this.

“Dr. Foster said you can!”

“She _showed_ us!”

“She and Darcy brought machines and put them together and made a big door, and she said that one day scientists would be able to use her machines to go anywhere in the universe!”

“Anywhere?” Natasha asked, affecting disbelief.

John threw his arms up in the air. “ _Anywhere_!”

Maddie nodded energetically, but then her face fell. “But Dr. Foster went through the door and she didn’t come back.”

“And then Darcy got upset and said we should probably go home because she was going to call the police and she didn’t want us to get arrested for trespassing,” John said.

“So we left,” Navid put in. “And we went to wait for the bus. But it didn’t come.”

“We waited for _hours_ ,” John complained, flopping dramatically onto the ground. “The bus didn’t come for hours and _hours_.”

“It didn’t come for, like, _ten whole minutes_ ,” Navid agreed. “So we came back here because there were helicopters landing and stuff and there were lots of people around and they looked like they were maybe the Men in Black or something so we hid. Are you the Men in Black? Was that, like, a documentary? Are you gonna wipe our memories?”

“I love the men in black!” yelled John, sitting back up. “Will Smith is _so cool_!”

“Are we in trouble?” Maddie asked, more to the point. She looked anxiously up at Clint and Natasha as they exchanged a look, each pondering the possible consequences of opening up what sounded like an experimental trans-dimensional portal in an abandoned factory in London.

“Don’t worry,” Natasha assured her, as Clint went to call up Agent Sitwell on his comm. “From what you’ve told me, you guys aren’t the ones who’re going to be in trouble _at all_.”

//


	6. Chapter 6

It was raining when they stepped out of the factory.

"Told you Thor was going to show up," Natasha said. She didn't even try to not sound smug, and Clint made a face at her.

"Aw," he said, and then, casting a look down at their companions, amended the rest of the exclamation to "- rain."

John giggled. "That's a weird thing to say. Wasn't that a weird thing to say?" he said, appealing to Natasha. "It's been raining for _ages_."

"It's been raining for, like, ten whole minutes," Navid agreed. He pointed. "Who's that?"

"You dummy!" John punched him in the arm. "Everyone knows who that is! Even little babies know who that is!"

"Ow! You jerk, I am _not_ a little baby!"

The two boys began whaling inexpertly at one another, the blows glancing harmlessly off their overstuffed jackets as Clint tried to pull them apart.

"Hey, hey, come on guys, no fighting!" he exclaimed, as Natasha said "Put your thumb on the _outside_ when you make a fist, boys." When he glared at her, she shrugged. "What? They should at least know how to do it _properly_."

Maddie tugged on her hand to get her attention. Natasha bent to listen, and the girl stood up on her toes to speak into her ear.

"Navid's parents don't believe in television," she whispered, as though imparting a great secret.

"Really? I've got bad news for them, then, since it definitely exists." Natasha smiled at her. " _You_ know who that is, right?"

Maddie nodded but, attacked by a recurrent fit of shyness, declined to say anything more.

She didn't need to. The broad, red-cloaked figure of Thor, God of Thunder, was immediately recognizable to anyone with the most cursory of access to popular media. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, a frown creasing his forehead, as he listened to Agent Sitwell, who kept lifting his right and left hands alternately as he tried to keep his glasses dry.

"Do you want to meet him?" Natasha asked, and was rewarded by a duet of 'Yeah!'s, and an increase in pressure as Maddie squeezed her hand.

The discontented expression cleared entirely from Thor's face when he saw the kids.

"Ah!" he boomed as they approached. "Are these new Avengers, my friends?" and Natasha could _feel_ the three of them falling a little in love with him. Heck, even she couldn't help feeling kind of warm and sappy inside. Whatever Agent Sitwell liked to tell the junior agents, she wasn't made of _stone_.

He even let them try to lift the hammer. Navid and John joined forces, puffing and panting as they heaved as hard as they could on the strap, and when John swore he had felt it move, just a _little_ , Thor solemnly agreed with him, straight-faced.

"Truly, your realm is blessed with mighty warriors!" he said, and John and Navid high-fived.

Agent Sitwell clapped his hands together, smiling the glassy smile of a man who wanted very badly to be good with children, and knew he wasn't. "Alright, kids! This _has_ been fun, hasn't it, but I'm afraid the grown-ups have to go back to work now. Say goodbye to Thor, everybody, and," - he looked around, and singled out a luckless victim from the pack of junior SHIELD agents - "Agent Cauldwell will give you all a ride back to your homes. He'll take very good care of you, _won't you Agent Cauldwell?_ "

Agent Cauldwell quailed.

//

Thor waved as the children were ushered away. It wasn't until they were out of earshot that he grew serious once more.

“So there is truly no trace of Jane Foster?” he said. “That is… concerning.”

“Gotta say, Point Break, you’re taking this a lot better than we thought you would,” Stark said, flipping back the faceplate on the Iron Man helmet. He had been summoned from inside the factory, where he had been, in his own words, 'busy doing Science', but he had refused to come down until the kids were gone. Natasha suspected that he had been afraid of being less popular with them than Thor.

Thor’s frown deepened. “You expected me to behave otherwise? The doctor Foster is an intelligent woman of great personal courage. Although I will admit that I am worried, I am confident that she has not come to any great harm.”

For all his professed confidence, though, his arms remained crossed over his chest, with Mjolnir dangling from a strap around his wrist. The hammer seemed to hold a particular fascination for Agent Sitwell, who had difficulty tearing his eyes away from it.

“Well!” he said. “We may not know where Dr. Foster is right at this moment, but we do have some useful information that I think you’ll be interested in. Mr. Stark, perhaps you would care to, ah…?”

“It looks like Dr. Foster was investigating some kind of gravitational anomaly in the building when she disappeared,” Stark said. “There’s this stairwell, crazy stuff, it forms a closed loop where anything you drop in it reappears -.”

“Yes, I am familiar with the portal you describe,” Thor cut in. “They are reportedly a common side-effect of the Convergence. I expect you will find many more of them in your Realm in the days ahead.”

Natasha stepped in to pick up the thread. “The kids were here at the time, and they said that Dr. Foster used some kind of machine to, I don’t know, open the portal, somehow. She described it as a door?” The tips of her fingers were going numb. She shoved them under her arms. “Thor, I don’t want to be difficult, but could you please make it… stop… raining?”

Thor looked surprised, as though he had failed to notice that everyone around him was soaking wet, and maybe he had. He himself was standing in the center of a circular patch of dry ground. “Of course. My apologies.”

The rain stopped immediately.

“Oh, is it _raining_?” Stark exclaimed, from within his well-insulated metal carapace. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Clint sneezed.

“Thanks. Anyways, according to the kids, Dr. Foster entered the portal. When she didn't return, the police were called.”

"And the portal?" Thor asked. "What lies on the other side? Who among you has been sent through to explore the realm beyond it?"

Stark might have shrugged. It was a gesture that was completely lost when he was in the armour. "Hey, if that was possible, I would've been the first in line. You know me and portals. But it closed after Dr. Foster went through. It's back to being useless now. Fun, but useless. Like a giant lava lamp."

Thor's frown deepened. He half turned away from them, apparently deep in thought.

“Our science team is hard at work on the problem,” Agent Sitwell assured him. “And Mr. Stark. We have - parts of the technology that seem to be necessary. It's only a matter of time before we can open the portal for ourselves. But of course we’ll let you know if we need anything hit with a hammer. Ha ha.”

“Ha ha,” said Stark, to be a dick.

Thor’s hand moved to grasp the handle of Mjolnir, and for a moment Natasha thought he was about to start cracking heads together until they opened the portal for him. She braced herself, prepared – to do what? Leap in front of him? Electrocute him with her Widow’s Bite? This was _Thor_ , he was practically indestructible – but instead he relaxed. Smiling, he let his arms drop to his sides, and every SHIELD agent within a fifty-meter radius began to breathe again.

“You speak wisely, Agent Sitwell,” he said cheerfully. “I shall heed your counsel. I will be glad to leave this matter in the hands of SHIELD.” Turning to the rest of them, he added: “And, truly, I am glad to see you again, my friends! Forgive me for not giving you a proper greeting sooner!” He clapped a hand on Stark’s shoulder, heavily enough that the smaller man’s knees would have buckled if he hadn’t been wearing the armour. “Man of Iron! Lady Natasha!” Natasha plastered on a smile to cover her surprise as he drew her into a hug with his other arm. “And the valiant Hawkeye! It is good to be with you all once more.”

Natasha found herself being squeezed up against his substantial chest as he seized Clint by the shoulder and drew him, protesting weakly, into their group hug. She heard Stark say “Easy, Barney, I don’t think Agent Romanov’s the hugging type,” and was glad when Thor didn’t listen to him. It was like being pressed up against a well-muscled hot-water bottle, and her fingers were _freezing_.

“Thank you, Agent Sitwell,” Thor was saying. “I am greatly relieved to know that the search for Dr. Foster will be in such capable hands here on Midgard, while my fellow Avengers and I search for an answer to her disappearance on Asgard.”

Natasha froze.

“Wait, what?” Clint said next to her, just as Agent Sitwell said “What do you mean, _Asgard_?” and Thor bellowed:

“ _Heimdall! Open the Bifrost!_ ”

Agent Sitwell was yelling. Natasha could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear the words. A rushing nose filled her ears. Clint was struggling beside her, but Thor’s arm lay like an iron girder across both their shoulders, pinning them in place.

Golden light filled her vision. Natasha shut her eyes.

When she opened them again, she saw stars.

//


	7. Chapter 7

Natasha’s first impression of Asgard was of stars.

More stars than she had ever seen in her lifetime. More stars than she had ever thought she _would_ see, splashed recklessly across a night sky. It was more than beautiful, it was _intoxicating_. Looking up, she felt as though she had lost her bearings, as though the weight of Thor’s arm was all that prevented her from tumbling head over heels into eternity.

“Aw,” Clint said from somewhere nearby, “ _space_. What the _hell,_ Thor?!”

Thor removed his arm from around their shoulders. “My friends, I apologize for bringing you here so unexpectedly, but I am sure you will bear me no ill-will when I explain -.”

“Explain _what?_ You practically _kidnapped_ us – no, wait, that is absolutely what you did, you _kidnapped us into space!_ ”

“Clint, stop overreacting and listen,” Natasha snapped. “And let go of my arm, I can’t feel my hand!”

“What are you talking about?” Clint said.

Natasha looked down at the fingers that were digging into her forearm. They were red, and shiny. “ _Iron Man?_ ”

“Sorry,” Stark said. His joints whirred as he let go and took a step back, but the golden faceplate remained tilted back, staring up at the star-speckled infinity. “It’s just… talk about a Total Perspective Vortex, huh?”

Natasha stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said finally.

“It is no wonder your friend is overawed,” boomed a voice behind them. “From here, an observer can see nine realms and ten trillion stars.”

They all turned around. Standing on a platform in the center of the floating space-gazebo they had materialized on was a vast figure decked out in an elaborate suit of armour, holding his sword in front of him like an Oscar statuette. He looked down at them, and when he met her eyes Natasha saw that his irises were the colour of gold.

“Welcome to Asgard, Lady Natasha,” boomed The Most Beautiful Man in the World, and she didn’t even care that he knew her name without being introduced.

“Thanks.” She was aware that she was staring, but she didn’t feel inclined to stop. “I love the view.”

The man graciously bowed his head. “It is truly magnificent,” he agreed.

“I wasn’t talking about the _stars_ ,” Natasha said. Beside her, Clint hissed “Oh my god, _Nat!”_ in an agonized tone of voice, but the Most Beautiful Man in the World winked at her. Natasha was starting to think that she could really enjoy spending time on Asgard.

“My friends, this is Heimdall, the Observer,” Thor said. “Heimdall, may I introduce the Lady Natasha, Lord Stark -.”

“Your introductions are unnecessary,” Heimdall interrupted. “I see all, and hear all. As you are aware.”

“Well, that’s not creepy,” Stark said. “Not in the least.”

“I am the Observer.” Heimdall thrust his sword into a holder at his feet, and stepped down off his dais. “From my station in the Observatory, I guard the Rainbow Bridge and protect the realm from those who would destroy it. I am known as Heimdall the Faithful – Heimdal the Eternal Vigilant – and for lo these many years I have been a trusted servant of Odin the All-Father, ruler of Asgard and protector of the Nine Realms.” He paused, significantly. “Who wishes to speak with you in his throne room, Prince Thor. _Now_.”

Thor winced.

“Well,” Clint said. He coughed. “I’m sure that’s going to go… well?”

“I see all, and hear all,” Heimdall reminded him. “I do not think it will.”

//

There was going to be a feast. Somehow, Natasha wasn't surprised.

“It is in celebration of our recent victory on Vanaheim,” Sif explained to her. She backed out of her closet with her arms full of items of clothing, and dumped them onto the bed. “The Marauders had become increasingly troublesome while the Bifost was broken, but this time we have struck a decisive blow against their forces.”

She picked a gauzy sort of dress out of the pile and held it at arm’s length, looking critically from it to Natasha.

“I’m afraid all of these may be rather long," she said apologetically. "But I’m sure we can find something that will suit.”

“That would be great. Thanks.” Natasha unclipped her Widow’s Cuffs before struggling out of her SHIELD catsuit. “I really appreciated this.”

They were in the small suite of rooms that Sif had the use of in the palace. She and a group of Asgardians introduced as the Warriors Three had met them on the Bifrost, and their party had divided along gender lines. Natasha had no idea what Clint and Stark were up to at the moment, but she was ready to bet that it involved a combination of alcohol and edged weapons. Thor had gone off to speak to his father, and hadn't been seen since.

She tossed her Widow’s Cuffs down on the bed and began to unzip her catsuit, but paused. Sif was watching her. Natasha tried to meet her eyes, and she quickly looked away, pretending to fuss with some of the clothing she had selected.

It wasn’t the first time. Natasha had caught her watching her off and on ever since they had met in the Observatory. She didn’t stare, not exactly, and she didn’t seem angry or jealous or afraid, but she stole glances every time she thought she was unobserved. She kept her distance too, as though she thought her guest was a wild animal who might startle if approached too closely.

Natasha didn’t know what to make of it. Of course, she was used to being looked at. It happened all the time, especially when she was in uniform – eyes that followed her down the hallways, the sense of being weighed, measured, watched. But that was in the Triskellion, or on the Helicarrier, where people knew who she was. They weren’t looking at her, they were looking at the Black Widow, or the Russian Avenger, or the ex-agent of Department X, and Natasha usually had a good idea of what they were thinking: did she deserve her place in SHIELD? Could they really trust her? How deep did that Red Room training run, exactly?

But here, in this place, however trillions of miles away (was it even a distance that could be measured in miles?), no one knew who she was, or what the Red Room had been. She had no idea what Sif was thinking.

She would have to find out.

“Do you mind..?” She pushed her hair away from the back of her neck and gestured to the snap that held the collar of her uniform closed.

Sif almost fell over her feet. “Of course!”

“If you could get the zipper, too -.”

“The what? This metal thing?”

“That’s the one, yes, thanks.” Sif unzipped it down to the middle of her back and Natasha took it from there, slipping her arms out of the sleeves. It was a relief to get out of it. “So, do you like living at the palace?”

Sif looked surprised by the question. “I am pledged to serve the All-Father. I must live here.”

“But do you _like_ it?” Natasha persisted. She undid the small zippers at her ankles and kicked off the rest of the catsuit. She hoped Asgard had talcum powder, otherwise she was never going to be able to get the damn thing back on.

“I suppose.” Sif sat down on the edge of her bed. “This is where I met Thor and Hogun and the others – I would not have come to know them so well had I stayed out in the country.”

“Is that where your family is? You must miss them.”

“I do,” she admitted. “Especially my sisters.” Her eyes dropped to the coverlet on the bed. She plucked at it with her fingers. “Did Thor ever… did you know that I am the only woman warrior to fight for the All-Father?”

Natasha jerked her head back from where she had been about to slip it through the collar of one of the dresses. “What? The _only_ one?”

“Of course I am not the first to fight,” Sif hastened to explain. “Women have fought before. We have always fought. But I am the first to do so as myself, without disguise.”

“I see." There certainly was not any disguise about Sif. The lady warrior was taller than she was, and her long legs were made even longer by the heels on the boots she was wearing. Natasha couldn’t keep her eyes off them.

“I have been lucky – very lucky. The All-Father himself approved my petition to be allowed to train at the palace, and Prince Thor has given me every support. He has been kindness itself. Even the All-Mother has taken an interest in my progress. But, for the time being, at least, I am alone. I had hoped, when I began - I thought that if I could prove myself, show what I could do -." She stopped and looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. "But things have been so unsettled lately. It would be selfish of me to demand more. It will come, in time."

Natasha was thoughtful as she finished pulling on the dress. She thought about all the women agents who worked and fought and bled for SHIELD - Maria Hill, Sharon Carter, Melinda May, Bobbie Morse, all those women who moved through the halls of the Triskelion and the field offices, burning, bright, and solitary as tigers. She couldn’t say that she was close to any of them, exactly, but at least they were _there_. She’d had to be many things, since she had come to SHIELD, but she had never been the _first_.

She looked down at herself. The dress was red, like a dried rose, and compared to the skin-tight fit of her SHIELD catsuit, it fit like a dream. "Will this do?"

“It’s beautiful.” Sif leapt to her feet and began fussing over it, adjusting the drape and tying the sash it came with it in a complicated knot above Natasha’s hip. “This silk is from Vanaheim - the Vanir are skilled in such arts. The All-Mother was born there, and she herself weaves the most beautiful cloth.”

“It’s perfect,” Natasha agreed, dropping down onto the bed.

Sif sat down next to her. “Of course you will stay here tonight,” she told Natasha, firmly. “The men’s dormitories are well enough, but – you know.” She made a face.

“I know," Natasha assured her, remembering the close quarters of the flight to London. "Thank you." She found Sif's hand among the covers, and squeezed her fingers. "And... look, I know it takes a long time to make people thing differently, and that it's hard to wait for things to change. But people can see you. They know you. They'll believe in you, in the end."

Sif smiled shyly. "Do you really think so?"

"I know so," Natasha said firmly.

They smiled at each other over the bed, both of them flushed and newly-shy, and then jumped as the long, low peal of a horn sounded throughout the palace.

“It’s starting!” Sif exclaimed. She seized Natasha by the arm and pulled her up. “We must hurry! We’ll be late!”

Laughing, Natasha let Sif drag her through the palace. They ran through the corridors hand-in-hand, shouting apologies over their shoulders as they barrelled past startled-looking servants and courtiers. The setting sun shone directly into the halls and balconies, and the sky overhead was coloured in vivid shades of pink and orange.

They crossed through a garden to reach the dining hall, and hiked up their skirts as they ran up the steps. The guards flanking the stairs flung open the doors of the dining hall to admit them. Sif grabbed Natasha’s hand, and pulled her into hell.

//


	8. Chapter 8

Massive fires burned in pits on either end of the hall. A single haunch from some unknown animal hung over each fire, and it took four strong men to turn the spits. Fat bubbled and frothed on the surface of the meat and dripped onto the coals, where it burned off in gouts of flame. A phalanx of men tended each fire, raking the coals and keeping it fed. They wore leather vests and gloves, and eyeshades to protect their faces, and every now and again one would break away from the line and run to plunge his head into one of the water buckets that stood at their backs, emerging with his beard sizzling. The scent of roasting meat made Natasha’s mouth water, and the stench of charred flesh turned her stomach.

Sif kept Natasha in front of her as she propelled her expertly through the crowd, keeping a tight grip on her arms. Tables and benches stretched the length of the room but people sat, or stood, or lay with their mouths open under barrels of mead, anywhere they liked. Natasha’s view was of an ever-changing kaleidoscope of muscular men and women in rough-spun cloth and furs as she was pushed, spun, and, at one point, pulled down so that she wouldn’t strike her head on a barrel being borne past.

The two men carrying the barrel set it on the table. One of them flicked the bung in with a tap of his finger. Mead splashed onto the floor, filling the air with the heady scent of fermentation before his companion jammed a spigot in place.

“Sigurd and Bjorn!” Sif explained, almost yelling into Natasha’s ear. The hall was almost a solid wall of sound. “Two of our most storied warriors! This is Natasha, from Midgard!”

Natasha looked up into a pair of faces that were, from her perspective, mostly beard and bristling nose hair.

“Midgard!” exclaimed Sigurd – or was it Bjorn? “A mortal! And what do you do on Midgard, mortal?”

Natasha hesitated. Sif squeezed her arm encouragingly.

“I’m a – a warrior,” she said, as loudly as she could. It was close enough to the truth, she decided, or at least close enough to a truth that they would understand.

“A mortal warrior! How novel!” Bjorn, or possibly Sigurd, turned away for a moment and turned back with a foaming tankard in each hand. “A toast to the mortal warrior!”

Sigurd and Bjorn both drained their tankards in one go. Natasha took a cautious sip from hers, and choked. She was grateful when Sif reached around her and took it from her.

“The food and drink from the All-Father’s hall is, perhaps, not best suited to Midgardian tastes,” she explained, slightly apologetically, after she had drained the tankard herself.

Sigurd smacked his lips loudly. Foam flecked his beard and moustache, and there was a large stain down the front of his tunic. “Finest mead in the Nine Realms!” he roared, and threw his tankard. It arced over the crowd and smashed against the far wall. “Another!”

“Another!” Bjorn echoed, following his lead. The sound of breaking crockery was lost amid the tumult.

As Sif led her away, Natasha saw a servant hurrying forwards with a tray full of tankards and a long-suffering expression.

Packed into the crush of people, she could see very little beyond what was immediately in front of her. An alarming number of people were carrying edged weapons.

More tankards were pressed into her hands. Sif couldn’t save her from all of them. Natasha essayed another sip from one as Sif yelled introductions to a succession of men and women, whose names were immediately lost in the noise from the feast. She thought she was beginning to get a taste for mead.

“A mortal, eh?” Another beard, topped by another pair of hirsute nostrils. “Haven’t had one of those here in a while. And what are you? A hero? On some sort of a quest, eh?”

The crowd shifted slightly, and through a gap between a man with an enormous double-headed axe strapped to his back and woman wearing an entire wolf as a cloak, Natasha spotted a familiar face.

“Actually, I’m his personal assistant,” she said, pointing through the crowd at Tony Stark. She smiled brightly at… whoever it was she was talking to. “I’d better go make sure he’s doing okay.”

The man smiled and raised his tankard to her, and turned back to his companions. Natasha shoved her way through the crowd to where she had caught a glimpse of Stark sitting at his ease at one of the tables, talking animatedly to a woman in a blue dress.

“Agent Romanov!” he exclaimed when he caught sight of her. He had his feet up on the table and a large, greasy bone in one hand. “Have you tried the grub? It’s amazing, there’s nothing they won’t roast on a spit here.” He took a large bite out of whoever’s drumstick he was holding and grinned at her as he chewed open-mouthed, before he recalled his manners (some of them, at least) and indicated his companion. She was an older woman, with a severe expression that reminded Natasha of a school teacher.

“This is Eir,” he explained expansively. There were a number of tankards in various states of emptiness scattered over the table at his elbow. Natasha hoped they weren’t all his. “She’s a Healer, which is what this highly technologically-advanced civilization calls its doctors, for some reason. We’ve been discussing quantum theory and its application in medicine, which has been great, even if she insists on bullshitting me about why she can speak and understand _English_.”

The Healer looked fond and exasperated at the same time. It was an expression that Stark seemed to inspire in a lot of severely intimidating, highly competent women. “Is it really so hard for you to believe in the power of anything beyond your Midgardian engineering?” she demanded. “Mimir’s Well of Wisdom holds the power of the All-Speak, and one sip of its waters grants a person mastery of all tongues and all understanding. The very fact that I can speak to you is proof of it!”

Stark leaned forwards, swaying only slightly. “Eir, my sweet,” he said, “I don’t believe it. You are being poetical with me, there is probably an earpiece connected to some sort of translation software tucked away in your shell-like ear…”

“There is a fountain of it in a courtyard of the palace,” Eir with great finality, as though she were laying down the trump card. “You may see it for yourself. The Well itself is on Jotunheim, of course, but it is guarded by the Aesir and a portion of its water was brought back to Asgard as tribute for the All-Father.”

“Jotunheim, Jotunheim… which one is that, again? Is it one of the ones with the elves?”

“Jotunheim is inhabited by Frost Giants. Fierce, war-like beasts. You ought to know of them, your realm was attacked by them, once.” The Healer realized that he was laughing at her, and flushed. “Does this really sound so absurd to you? Very well, then we shall speak of other things. How is the weather on Midgard?”

“Eir, baby, don’t be like that!” Tony wheedled. He seized her hand and kissed her knuckles. “You are my Madame Curie, my Ada Lovelace. I was a fool to doubt you.”

Eir pushed him away, blushing furiously, and began to scold him. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

“That’s nice,” Natasha said. “Glad you’re having fun.”

She stepped away from the table, and was instantly swept back into the maelstrom of the dining hall.

She had lost Sif. Sweat poured off of her. Her borrowed dress stuck uncomfortably to her skin. The air itself felt greasy, textured by the meat in the roasting pits.

A group of Asgardian warriors were standing together with their arms around each other’s shoulders, belting out what Natasha guessed was a popular folk song: something about a woman with golden hair. As all the singers had chosen their own key and tempo apparently at random and it was difficult to follow the words. The people at either end of the group were using their tankards to conduct with, and everyone involved was very damp.

“We need a soprano!” one of them yelled. An arm landed around Natasha’s shoulder and she was pulled forwards into the group. “Come on, lass, give it your best!”

“No, I couldn’t,” she demurred, laughing. “I’m not a singer, I’m a – a -.”

The memory of that morning flashed across the forefront of her brain. It felt as though it had all happened years ago, but she remembered three small faces, and a hand slipped trustingly into hers –

“A teacher.” She almost had to shout to be heard over the raucous singing.

“You don’t say! My brother was a tutor at the palace, once. He taught navigation to the princes – to the Prince Thor, that is.” The man leaned closer and said, in what was probably supposed to be a whisper, but was really more of a dull roar: “ _We don’t talk about the other one._ ”

He winked both eyes at her and solemnly laid a finger against the side of his nose on his second try.

Before Natasha could muster an appropriate response, she was knocked out from under his arm by a passing group of impromptu dancers. Carried away by the flow of the crowd, she stepped on a discarded tankard and had to grab the elbow of the woman standing nearest to her to keep from falling.

The woman looked at her, surprised. She wasn’t Sif. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she said. “Who are _you_?”

She demanded it, not unkindly, with the natural arrogance of one who had never had to be asked who _she_ was. Someone upper-class. A noble, or whatever the equivalent was on Asgard. She leaned closer, peering down her aquiline nose, and Natasha felt something inside of her snap under her scrutiny.

Surprising even herself, she blurted out: “I’m a dancer.”

She didn’t know what made her say it. She hadn’t thought about that part of her life for years. She must be drunk. Just a little bit. She would be more careful, from now on.

“A dancer?” The woman’s eyes travelled over her once more, from her head to her feet. “A challenging medium. Do you enjoy it?”

“I – yes?” The uncertainty in her own voice made her wince. “I think so?”

This was getting worse and worse. Fortunately, at that moment a table and all its contents went crashing to the floor as two men lunged at each other, swinging their fists. No one seemed at all alarmed, but Natasha took advantage of the distraction to slip away.

Trailing scarves and sleeves of silk and linen caught on the heavy golden bracelets Sif had lent her. She trod on someone who lay passed out on the floor and tripped over dogs quarreling over scraps of food. People offered her mead, roasted meat, torn loaves of bread and hunks of hard cheese but she refused it all, wanting only a little space, a breath of clear air, until she was seized by the shoulders and spun around into a voluminous embrace. She stiffened, alarmed, but relaxed when she looked up and saw that it was only Volstagg, whom she had met in the Observatory.

“There she is!” he boomed, belly quivering against her cheek. He released her and held her at arm’s length as he beamed down at her. “The warrior-maiden! Lady of the SHIELD!”

Bemused and relieved to have found a familiar face, Natasha let him lift her up to sit on the edge of the nearest table. Clint shuffled aside to make room for her, looking flushed and self-conscious. They were all there – Volstagg, Fandral and Hogun, and even Sif, who exclaimed: “I thought I had lost you! What have you been doing all this time?”, as though Natasha could tell her.

“The Red Avenger!” exclaimed Volstagg, who hadn’t finished. “Terror of the Chitauri! None who stand against her can prevail!”

“Here, here!” Fandral assented, raising his tankard.

“ _Someone’s_ been telling tales out of school,” Natasha muttered in Clint’s ear. He had the decency to appear at least slightly embarrassed.

“He has been telling us of the quest that brought you to Asgard,” Hogun explained. “We are all very grieved to hear of the disappearance of Jane Foster.”

The ends of Volstagg’s moustaches turned down in a comical expression of sorrow. “Such a fine, brave young woman! Courage beyond anything! When I think of her being snatched away by some villainous crew - !”

“You think she’s been kidnapped?” Natasha asked.

“Why, what else?” Fandral exclaimed, surprised. “Asgard and its royal family are not without enemies, after all, and there are those among them who would not hesitate to strike at Thor through one whom he loved.”

The men standing around their group nodded in solemn agreement. Only Sif looked doubtful.

“You assume too much,” she said. “Surely the blame for Jane Foster’s disappearance can be laid at the feet of Jane Foster herself.”

“What!” Fandral scoffed. “That little titch of a girl? How is that possible?”

“We know she is interested in the paths that exist between the Realms,” Sif pointed out. “What could be more natural than that she has stumbled into one of them in the course of her investigations? There, you know, Heimdall’s sight could not reach her – and without the knowledge of how to navigate them, she would be unable to return to Midgard.” She looked around at each of them in turn, daring them to argue with her. “Jane Foster is a dangerous woman.”

Fandral guffawed. “To be sure, _you_ would think so, Sif,” he said, and winked knowingly at Volstagg. “But you must admit that your judgement may be just a _little_ faulty where the paramour of our Prince Thor are concerned -.”

“Oh, I say,” Volstagg exclaimed, and even Hogun looked disapproving, but neither of them could top Sif’s reaction, which was to punch Fandral in the face.

The blow landed squarely on his jaw and sent him sprawling over the table behind him. The men and women standing nearest to them leapt out of the way as he lay blinking stupidly amid the scattered plates and toppled candles.

“I speak as a warrior, not as a woman!” Sif shouted, raising her voice to be heard over the shouts and laughter. She looked around at each of them in turn, daring them to argue. “I would no more trust Jane Foster than I would trust a beast of the forest, or a stinging insect. She is a creature who will follow her nature and she hungers for knowledge, no matter the cost. No consideration for others will stop her in her quest for understanding.”

“Come now!” Volstagg protested. “Surely you have more faith in Thor’s judgement than that! Someone whom he esteems – whom he loves, perhaps -.”

Sif drew back her head. “It would not be the first time,” she said coldly, “that Thor has been wrong about one whom he loved.” 

None of them could find an answer to that. Volstagg dropped his eyes. Satisfied that she had made her point, Sif tossed her head defiantly before turning on her heel and stalking off.

Natasha was aware that Clint's eyes were on Sif as she shoved her way past a pair of musclebound bruisers. She draped her arms around his shoulders, pulling him against her chest in a tight hug.

“You _lo-ove_ her,” she said in his ear, in a sing-song voice. It made perfect sense, she had to admit. Clint definitely had a type. “You want to have her _ba-abies_.”

Clint’s face was crimson as he tried to shove her off. “I’ll push you into that stupid well Tony won’t shut up about,” he hissed. “I’ll tell Fury you fell in. _No one will know_.”

Natasha beat her heels against the table. She was _definitely_ tipsy, and she was _loving_ it. “Sif and Cli-int, sittin’ in a tree; K-I-S-S-.”

Clint pinched her painfully on the knee. She kicked him in the shin.

“Well!” Volstagg exclaimed, and laughed self-consciously. “To hear her speak, you would think Jane Foster was another – well!”

“You can say his name,” Fandral grumbled. He sat up amid the wreckage of broken crockery and half-finished meals and rubbed his jaw. “He isn’t some sort of demon, that we need fear summoning him accidentally.”

He stopped short, however, of actually naming _him_ himself: and an awkward silence followed, in which Fandral looked annoyed, Volstag grew red in the face, and Hogun appeared as impassive as he always did.

 _We don’t talk about the other one_.

The tendons in Clint’s neck were stiff with tension. She rubbed her thumb in a circle over the spot at the very base of his skull, and reached around him to steal the drink out of his hand, to give him something to be annoyed about.

“Do you see Loki very much?” she asked, and she didn’t need to have her fingers on Clint’s neck to know when his pulse jumped. “Thor told us he had been imprisoned.”

The Warriors Three exchanged a look.

“He is forbidden to have visitors,” said Volstagg.

“We see him when we bring in new prisoners to the dungeons,” Fandral said, “but he never gives any sign he notices us. Which, naturally, I wouldn’t respond if he _did_ ,” he added quickly, “because he is forbidden to have visitors. But he doesn’t. Give any sign, that is.” He sounded offended at being denied the opportunity for such a snub.

“He has changed, since I saw him last,” Volstagg remarked. “He seems… colder, now. Harder.”

“Is he, though? Or is it just that he no longer hides it?” Fandral countered. “He wasn’t always an easy fellow to like. He could be charming, but… there was always something a little _off_ about Loki.”

They seemed to find it a relief to be talking about him. Natasha could imagine what a long shadow he must have cast: how he would have haunted every meal, every conversation, and every one of their leisure moments, despite his physical absence. Betrayal had that effect on the people left behind. It left you questioning every last bit of your past.

“You’re not wrong there,” Volstagg said. “Do you know, after one of our skirmishes with the Marauders, oh, years ago – we were feasting afterwards, speaking of the great deeds and mighty blows we had struck for Asgard, you know how it is -.”

The warriors (and Clint) nodded. They certainly did know how it was.

“And he had the cheek – the absolute cheek! – to ask me if I thought it would be more difficult to fight them if they were not monsters. If I would be more reluctant to raise my sword against the enemies of Asgard if they had Aesir faces and Aesir manners!” He scoffed and shook his head over the sheer effrontery of the question.

“And what did you say?” Natasha asked.

Volstagg scowled. “I pointed out the obvious, of course – that if they had Aesir manners, they wouldn’t go around _attacking_ people all the time. And do you know what he did?” He huffed. “He _laughed_ at me! The impudent puppy!”

Fandral shook his head. “He always did have an inappropriate sense of humour.”

“He hungered for knowledge,” Hogun said. “Not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, such as Jane Foster seeks, but knowledge for the power it represents. And it has cost him much – more, I think, than we know - to acquire it. Certainly there is no one who has travelled so extensively on the paths between the realms, and yet what has it ever brought him but pain?”

“Absolutely right!” Volstagg reached out and lifted a full tankard out of the hands of a passing warrior. “Far better to stay at home and serve your king and reap the fruits of victory, eh?”

He tossed back the tankard of mead. As he drank, the man whose tankard he had taken tapped him on the shoulder. When Volstagg turned around, he punched him full in the face.

A brawl seemed about to ensue. Natasha was about to suggest to Clint that they lay bets when Thor’s hand landed on her shoulder.

“Lady Natasha," he said. He looked grave. “May I speak with you?”

//

Natasha assumed, at first, that Thor would speak to her where they were: but when seconds passed and he didn’t speak, only stood frowning thoughtfully at the floor (to all appearances deaf and blind to the windmilling arms and shouted insults of the brawlers), she realized he wanted a private conversation. So she slipped down off the table, giving Clint’s knee a reassuring squeeze on the way past, and Thor tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow before taking her off for a turn around the banquet hall.

Natasha was glad to have him as an escort. The hall was thick with people in various stages of intoxication, but no matter what mental state they were in they still made way for their prince: and when they didn’t, he was perfectly capable of picking them up with one hand and setting them none too gently aside, to the hilarity of their friends.

And if the noise of the crowd provided a rather obvious cover for their conversation, well, what of it? Asgard in general seemed to be about as subtle as a blow from Mjolnir. Spy craft was evidently not part of the curriculum for young princes. But in spite of the relative privacy of the dining hall, Thor seemed reluctant to come to the point.

“You have eaten well? Drunk well?” he inquired solicitously, though it was obvious to Natasha that his true thoughts lay elsewhere. “The meat is from the haunch of the Saerimnir, a beast never seen in your realm. Carve your dinner from it tonight, and by the morning it will be whole again. The honey the mead is brewed from comes from bees that build their combs in the skulls of dead men. It is said that a man who drinks deeply enough of it is granted wisdom beyond understanding.”

“It’s all very nice, Thor,” Natasha said. “Everyone’s been very kind.”

“I am glad,” he said, and then changed tacks with all the delicacy of an ocean liner. “The All-Father refuses to search for Jane Foster. He claims he cannot spare the men, or even Heimdall’s aid, to help SHIELD find her.” The lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth made him look older than he had at any time Natasha had known him. She wished she could say something to make him smile. “More than that – he insists that _my_ presence is required on Asgard. In spite of all that I have told him of how, when I was alone and powerless on Midgard, Jane Foster gave me shelter, fed and clothed me, he will not grant permission for me to accompany you back to your realm. He claims that any debt I owe was paid in full when I defended her and the others from the Destroyer, and he will not _listen_ -.”

Natasha felt the muscles in his arm tense under her hand, which was… _incredibly distracting_ , but also a worrying indication that he was close to losing his temper. While she, Clint and Stark had been mingling with the hoi-polloi at the feast, Thor had been seated next to his father on a raised dais at the end of the hall. The atmosphere between them had been distinctly thunderous, not a good thing when one of them was an actual God of Thunder.

“Thor – it’s alright. SHIELD will understand. They aren’t going to just _give up_ on finding Jane Foster. We’ll find her.”

Thor’s brow did not clear. “These are dangerous times,” he said, half to himself. “The Convergence puts all the realms in danger, and then there is the broken treaty with Jotunheim, and the Bifrost is only newly repaired… But I will not allow Jane's safety to be jeopardized by his stubborn refusal to act. Regardless of the All-Father’s orders, I _will_ assist you in your search for her.”

An Aesir who had imbibed too freely of the All-Father’s mead, and was presumably suffering from the possession of wisdom beyond understanding, lay sprawled in their path. Thor put his hands around Natasha’s waist and lifted her easily over top of him. Her feet left the ground for less than a second, and the fluttery feeling in her stomach was _completely_ out of proportion to the event.

“Um, thank you?” The All-Father wasn’t the only stubborn one in the family, but Natasha knew she had to try. “Thor, are you sure that’s wise? If your father says he needs you – if Asgard needs you -.”

“I owe Jane Foster a debt. Surely you understand? Regardless of my personal feelings. Jane was a friend to me when I stood in dire need of one. I cannot stand idly by while she may be in similar straits: alone, among strangers, not knowing who to trust, or where to turn for assistance.”

Alone and among strangers. “Yes. I think I understand that.” Her eyes ranged over the crowd until she found Clint. He was either being drowned or doing the Asgardian equivalent of a keg-stand as Fandral and Volstagg held him upside-down with his head in a barrel. “But SHIELD is looking for her. You can leave it to them to find her and bring her back. I understand that you’re worried, but you don’t have to do this.”

Thor was silent for a moment as he considered this, and when he next spoke his voice was pitched low. “I mean no disrespect to you, Lady Natasha, or to those whom you serve. But when I heard Agent Sitwell speak, I could not help but remember how these agents of the Shield appeared when I first crossed paths with them. How they stole Jane’s research, and sought to keep me from Mjolnir. And, later, how they admitted to using the Tesseract so foolishly.”

Natasha finished his thought for him. “You don’t trust SHIELD.” Her eyes wandered back to Clint, who had been set back on his feet amid a hail of hearty backslaps. “But you do trust… us?”

“I do.” Thor laid his hand on her shoulder. “You and I, Lady Natasha, and the Hawkeye, we have fought together. The battlefield forges bonds closer than those of mere friendships. Surely after all that we have experienced it is natural that I would wish to have my comrades-in-arms at my side at such a time as this?” He squeezed her shoulder and smiled. “I stand by what I have said, Lady Natasha. You will not have to seek Jane Foster alone.”

Natasha was watching him as he made his way back to his seat by the father’s side, and so she saw when Sif appeared from out of the crowd and took her prince by the arm, speaking urgently to him. She wondered what they were talking about.

Asgard, it seemed, was a more complicated place than she had at first assumed.

A shout went up as Volstagg slipped from the grip of the warriors holding him and became temporarily wedged in the barrel. Clint came to his rescue by staving in the other end, an act of heroism that was immediately and abundantly toasted by those who had witnessed it. Someone began composing a saga about it.

“I’m going to step out for some fresh air,” Natasha said, although no one was really listening. “I’ll just be a moment.”

They didn’t seem to notice when she left.

//


	9. Chapter 9

Outside the dining hall the air was cool and quiet. Night had fallen long ago. The white stone of the palace glowed in the moonlight and, closer to, the neatly-trimmed trees and shrubs cast moon-shadows on the short grass.

Natasha slipped out into the garden and leaned against the wall for a moment as she regained her bearings. Snatches of song and boisterous laughter, mingling with the crash of broken crockery, filtered out through the narrow windows above her. She could make out Clint’s voice in the distance, leading an Asgardian chorus through the traditional Midgardian ballad ‘Jolene’.

She laid the back of her hand against each of her cheeks in turn. They were burning. Pushing off from the wall, Natasha walked further into the garden, smiling to herself as she considered the truly absurd number of lies she had told inside the dining hall. What on earth had possessed her? She should have stuck with the truth, or at least part of it: that she was an Avenger, a warrior, like them.

But of course that was only _part_ of the truth. The larger truth, the one that overshadowed the rest, was that she was a spy. And spies told lies.

She closed her eyes. Just for a moment, she allowed herself to regret all the circumstances that had led to her becoming Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow. Given another chance, in another life, she could have been anything…

A ballet dancer, perhaps.

She had been one, once. It had been when she was still with the Black Widow Program: one of those missions that had started out with her slowly blinking awake in a new city, a new bed, with a new name and a new face, and a new identity settling into the forefront of her mind as the Red Room’s machines did their work. She had trained with the Bolshoi Ballet for – she couldn’t remember now. Months? Years? She _remembered_ years of training, but _remembering_ meant nothing at all when the Red Room could give you all the memories you liked for free, without the trouble of having to live them.

They had reinvented her, every time. Renewed her, even. And then, when the mission was over, all she had to do was close her eyes, and when she opened them again she was once more Natalia Alianovna Romanova, the pride of the Black Widow Program.

She had been anyone they wanted her to be. An orphan. An oligarch’s daughter. A ballet dancer.

But then she had joined SHIELD, and all SHIELD ever wanted her to be was an ex-Soviet assassin with a violent past.

The thought threatened to sour her mood. She shook it off and kept walking. She didn’t regret joining SHIELD. She owed them her life and her freedom, and a lot more besides. She had come to SHIELD with a history written in red ink and now, for the first time, there were a few lines of black in there as well, thanks to the work she did for them.

Why had she even been in the Bolshoi in the first place? She couldn’t remember _that_ , either. Had she been spying on someone? A defector, perhaps? Department X couldn’t have wanted to use one of their precious Black Widows to assassinate a ballet dancer, surely. Or had there been someone else?

She couldn’t remember killing anyone, but again – remembering meant nothing at all. The Red Room could take memories as easily as they created them.

Debits and credits. Red ink and black. Thor had said he owed Dr. Foster a debt, and Natasha had the impression that it was something that went beyond a simple offer of hospitality, or even love. For the first time she considered that, what Clint was to her, Dr. Foster might be to Thor: that he might feel that he had become a new person through meeting her. They knew nothing of what he had been like before he had come to Midgard, after all. The thoughtful, almost solemn man who was their fellow Avenger might be someone very different from the golden prince who had grown up within these walls: who had run, perhaps, down this very hallway, and played in the shadows of these very trees…

Natasha stopped in her tracks and pinched the bridge of her nose, hard. She could feel a headache coming on. She had spilled as much mead as she could, but she hadn’t been able to avoid drinking _all_ of it. She was being absurd. Thor, with his anachronistic sense of honour and royal lineage, was nothing like her, and it was a disservice to him to think that he was. He was a kind man with a very nice girlfriend…

… who had apparently disappeared through some sort of rift in the space-time continuum.

If Natasha had been given to outward displays of emotion she would have groaned and buried her face in her hands. If Jane Foster had, in fact, managed to travel to some other dimension, then how the _hell_ were they supposed to find her? She hoped to god that the SHIELD R &D Department was getting ready to pull some kind of magic wand out of their asses that they could wave and clear this whole mess up because otherwise, without Asgardian technology to back them up, their mission was doomed to fail.

Her borrowed clothes hung awkwardly from her shoulders and stuck to the sweat on her back. Somehow the dress didn’t feel quite as comfortable as it had at the beginning of the evening, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? She could make herself _look_ as though she belonged, but that didn’t change the fact that she was out of her depth. They were _all_ out of their depths.

She thought of the maelstrom of the feast, all those bodies pushing and shoving, talking too loudly and eating foods that were too rich and drinks that were too strong. Asgard, with its oversized people and gargantuan architecture, was making her feel like a child.

Unlike when she was a child, there was no one here to tell her what to do.

Drawing in a deep breath she exhaled through her nose, and tipped her head back to look up at the palace that surrounded her. High arches, colonnades and buttresses loomed out of the darkness around her like the rigging of a ghost ship, silent and still, bearing the weight of eons undreamt of by mortal minds. The unifying details of ornamentation were obscured by the night’s veil, and what in the daylight was an imposing statement of Asgard’s power now appeared as a rubble pile of towers, half-seen balconies and slivers of rooftop.

What she needed, even more than a glass of water and a couple of Tylenol, was something that she was _good_ at...

Tying the loose folds of her dress up into a knot to leave her legs free and tucking her borrowed jewelry safely away, Natasha stretched, and began to climb.

//

The palace was quiet, but it was far from asleep: and in amongst the many hundreds of lives being lived quietly inside its walls, the Black Widow moved like a shadow.

Light as a cat, she climbed the balcony railings, and hung upside-down by her knees to peek in through darkened windows and open doors. Once she found a lighted guardroom where a handful of Einherjar guards had laid aside their stag-beetle helmets and were relaxing with a few bottles and a game that involved rolling small square bones across the floor. They were gossiping, the way men with a shared occupation and coworkers in common did, and she listened for a moment before moving on, much preferring to eavesdrop on the good-natured teasing of a pair of girls who were scrubbing a flight of stairs.

She felt no malice as she spied, only a pleasant awareness of her own superiority that put her in charity with all the world. While the All-Father hosted his revels, there was still work to be done, and Natasha amused herself by doing her part to help: by rekindling extinguished torches, straightening crooked wall hangings, and once even smoothing out a rumpled carpet just ahead of the hurrying feet of a major-domo before he could trip over it.

Other Einherjar guards were on duty, patrolling the hallways and corridors, but there was no question of them being a threat. They were like children’s toys, robots that you wound up and set walking in a straight line. The only way they were going to see her was if one of them _stepped_ on her. She dogged the heels of a pair of them for a while, being careful to match the pace of their steps, and toyed with the idea of lifting a dagger from one of their belts as a souvenir – but her natural caution asserted itself in time and she slipped back out onto the balcony instead, away from temptation.

Outside, she rested for a moment, leaning her forearms against the railing and looking down into the courtyard below. From here she could see the dining hall, and as she listened to the sounds of revelry that spilled from it, she enjoyed the twin sensations of _seeing_ and _not being seen_. Alone like this she could almost believe (and maybe she did, a little) that the palace was hers alone: that no one else knew its secrets, its hiding places, and its nocturnal rhythms the way she did.

Which was absurd. She had been there for less than a day. But it was a feeling that came naturally to spies and trespassers.

Natasha became aware that she was being watched. A very large long-haired cat was crouched on the railing little more than an arms-length from her. Its yellow eyes, trained on hers, bore a keen and penetrating expression.

“Hello," she told it. "You’re very beautiful.”

As though sensible of the compliment, the cat began to purr. Its long and brush-like tail twitched back and forth as it hung down off the edge of the railing.

Smiling, Natasha tilted her head back and looked up at the unfamiliar constellations that shone in the sky above her. She wondered what Dr. Foster would make of them, if she could see them. Maybe she could, if she was trapped on one of the paths between the worlds.

“Paths between worlds,” she repeated aloud, and looked at the cat. “Now, who do we know who’s travelled the paths between worlds?”

_He’s not a demon, that we need fear summoning him._

The cat laid its ears against its head and hissed. For one, terrifying moment Natasha wondered if it had heard her thoughts, and understood– but then it whipped around, lashing out with its paw, and she saw a dark shape burst into flight behind it. The sound of beating wings tore at the air, and the cat fled back inside the palace.

“The birds tease the cats dreadfully, I’m afraid,” said an unfamiliar, and unexpected, voice. “They pull their tails.”

Natasha spun around, her heart hammering against her ribs. There was no one there. There _could_ be no one there. She had _looked_. She must have imagined the sound: but then a shadow moved, grew larger, and detached itself from the wall, taking on the form of a woman in a blue dress.

She and Natasha stared at one another across the space of the balcony.

The queen of Asgard wore no crown. No diadem circled her brow; no ring of power sat on her finger. And yet, without ever having seen her before, Natasha had no doubt that this was her: Frigga, Thor’s mother. _Loki’s_ mother.

The All-Mother.

It was in the eyes, she decided: the eyes, and the small, ironic twist to her mouth. She looked very much like a mother, one who had caught one of her children doing something naughty.

“Out for some fresh air, my dear?” the All-Mother said at last. “I frequently find the atmosphere at these feasts to be a little oppressive, myself.”

The words were innocuous enough in and of themselves, but her voice held an arch tone, a squeeze of lemon, that made Natasha wince. She began to pick apart the knot that held her skirt up, feeling self-conscious.

A glimmer of hope presented itself. After all, she was wearing Asgardian clothes, and there was no reason for the queen of Asgard to know who she was. There were many people present in the palace for the feast. She could pass herself off as a provincial, some harmless nobody from the countryside. It would be easy. She was a _Black Widow_. Deception was her watchword.

With her dress untangled she sank to the floor in a low curtsey, remaining there until the All-Mother gestured for her to rise.

“I – I beg your pardon,” she stammered. “I was lost. I apologize for disturbing you.”

The All-Mother’s smile widened. “That’s very understandable. The palace can be a maze for those who are not familiar with it. But if you follow the corridor behind me, you will find your way back to the dining hall easily enough.”

She did not, however, move aside to let Natasha past her.

The awkward, silent impasse between them stretched on.

At last Natasha, growing more and more uncomfortable, decided that it was up to her to leave first. She curtsied again, on the principle that a little obsequiousness couldn’t hurt, and edged past the queen as politely as she could.

She was almost into the corridor – they were shoulder-to-shoulder – when the All-Mother spoke again.

“I do wish you wouldn’t hurry off, though. I have long wanted to speak to you, Natalia Romanova.”

It was a blow - and just as she would have in the field or in the training gym, she absorbed it, let it run through her body from the hollow of her shoulder to the soles of her feet, and shrugged it off without letting it show. It was a blow, because it was so often _meant_ as one. Hearing her own name represented the twitching aside of her mask, the tugging off of her wig: _no more lies, little spider, we_ know _who you are_ …

“I have heard so much about you from my son.” The light, conversational tone of the All-Mother’s voice was at odds with the tension Natasha felt. “Why, I almost feel as though we are acquainted already.”

How much did the All-Mother know? What had Thor said about her? ‘Hello Mother, Hello Father, I’m back and I’ve brought with me Midgard’s finest archer, their most brilliant inventor, and Natasha, who kills people.’

It looked bad. It could be terrible: for her, for Thor, for SHIELD and for Midgard-Asgard relations generally. And why? Because she wasn’t a ballet dancer, or a teacher, or any of the other ridiculous lies she had told.

She was a spy, and she had behaved like one.

Appalled, she spun around to face the All-Mother. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to – I’m not,” – going to _kill_ anyone, she almost blurted out, but stopped herself in time.

It took all of her self-control not to jerk back as the All-Mother took her hands. She was smiling fondly at her, as though at a favoured but erring child.

“You needn’t worry, my dear. I merely wished to talk.” She released her and turned towards the archway that led inside the palace, indicating with a tilt of her head that Natasha should follow her. “Come, Natalia Romanova. It is so seldom, after all, that I get to meet my son’s friends.”

//

This wing of the palace was silent, and unlit. Natasha followed the train of the All-Mother's dress as it hissed over the stone floor. The sound of their footsteps rang out, bell-like, in the empty halls.

“It has been a long time – a very long time! – since Asgard has had the privilege of hosting anyone from your realm,” the All-Mother said. She moved confidently through the darkened palace, and Natasha had the impression that this was a path that she had trod many times before. "It is so strange to think of how much is new to you that we take entirely for granted.” A narrow staircase ran in a tight spiral down to an arched doorway. Natasha followed the All-Mother through it. “So much of our culture, and our history, too, would be entirely unknown to you. Like the history of the Convergence, perhaps.”

The doorway led into a small, enclosed courtyard, paved with large square tiles. Climbing plants grew along the outside walls and reached up towards the railing of the balcony above them. A tiered fountain burbled softly in the center of the yard.

The All-Mother seated herself on the rim of the fountain, and after hesitating for a moment Natasha joined her. A faint mist from the moving water stuck to her skin. It felt ice-cold, and made a pleasant contrast to the warm night air.

“The All-Father has forbidden Thor to accompany you back to Midgard because he fears what might happen at the height of the Convergence, when the Nine Realms have moved into alignment," the All-Mother said. "And he is wise to do so. The last time such a thing happened, the Dark Elf Malekith sought to unleash a weapon that would have plunged all the Nine Realms into darkness.”

It was a clear night. The sky above them was dusted with bright stars. Natasha imagined them winking out, one by one, all across the universe. “What stopped him?”

“Asgard did. Asgard and the Bifrost. Malekith commanded a mighty army, but even they could not hold out against soldiers with the power to appear anywhere, even in the midst of their own ranks. The control of the Bifrost has ever been one of the All-Father’s greatest responsibilities, and the greatest source of his strength. Many paths exist between the realms, but the Bifrost is one of only a few artefacts with the power to make a path between them, by brute force.” The All-Mother’s eyes glittered strangely in the dark, like a cat’s. “The Tesseract is another such.”

Something small rustled in the vines that twined up the courtyard’s trellises. A bird, perhaps, with a nest tucked safe away amongst the leaves.

“You might have accomplished much with it, had my husband not taken it away," the All-Mother said.

Natasha licked her lips. In spite of the humid air around the fountain, her throat was dry. “It was for the best. Loki...”

“He _did_ make a nuisance of himself, didn’t he?" The All-Mother sounded more amused than concerned. "But you defeated him, you and the others. You saw to it that he was put in chains and dragged off your world in disgrace. And yet when Thor left Midgard he took not only Loki but the Tesseract as well!”

“He needed it. He couldn’t get back to Asgard without it.”

“The Bifrost is repaired now,” the All-Mother reminded her. “The All-Father has no further use for the Tesseract – in fact, he has packed it up to gather dust someplace that _he_ thinks is safe.” Her eyes narrowed. “The _polite_ thing to do would have been to return it.”

She wasn’t wrong. And yet, as Natasha knew, there was a very long way between _not being wrong_ and being _right_.

“We weren’t ready,” she said, and she truly believed it. Even if Loki had never shown up, if SHIELD had kept the Tesseract... She worked for SHIELD, and she was loyal to them, but they could make mistakes. She remembered Steve’s expression as he dumped the Phase-Two weapons, with their incriminating little skull-and-octopus logos, onto the lab bench in the Helicarrier. “It was too much responsibility.”

The All-Mother reached over and covered Natasha’s hand with her own. “How very responsible of you.” She sounded perfectly serious but Natasha suspected that she was being laughed at, somewhere deep down. “It isn’t everyone who could be so sanguine about giving up so much power. With the Tesseract, Midgard could have created a Bifrost of its own.” She drew back her hand with a sigh. “Without it, how will you find Jane Foster?”

The bird in the vines sang a snatch of song and then, apparently realizing that it was still night, fell silent.

“You said there were other ways… other paths…”

The All-Mother nodded. “There are. Jane Foster was investigating such paths when she disappeared. In fact, she might be considered Midgard’s expert on them. Hers is truly a unique mind: such brilliance, and such a tenacious intelligence! She will be a great asset to your realm when Midgard is ready to take its place among the Council of Worlds.” And there was that smile again, the one that enjoyed a private joke at other people’s expenses. “It is such a pity you cannot consult her on her own disappearance!”

“SHIELD has other experts,” Natasha said, with a confidence she did not feel.

The All-Mother raised one eyebrow, but merely remarked: “That is just as well. And of course you have Asgard to protect you, in case this Convergence should prove as dangerous as the last. The All-Father and his armies have defended Midgard before, though your people do not remember it. There was a time in your very distant past when Jotunheim invaded your world. They used the Casket of Ancient Winters in much the same way that your people would have used the Tesseract, but Asgard was there to beat the Frost Giants back and seize the casket, to keep it safe.” Her tone was arch. “Asgard is very good at keeping things _safe_.”

Natasha was conscious that she was being examined. This was a test, and what was being said was not really what was meant.

“The All-Father takes his responsibilities as a protector very seriously," the All-Mother said. "He is pledged to protect Vanaheim as well – my own home world. A happy turn of events, considering that our people were once at war. The marriage between myself and the All-Father was brokered as part of the peace treaty, and since then, Asgard has defended Vanaheim, just as it has defended Midgard. And just as it would have defended Jotunheim, too, had Loki not killed their king, and broken the peace treaty.”

Defended them from everything but columns of golden warriors, pouring out of a rift in the sky.

“It must be hard,” Natasha ventured, “living with the people your family were once at war with…”

“Oh, all of the Realms have been at war at one time or another over the centuries,” the All-Mother said easily. “But why dwell on the past? The Aesir certainly don’t.” Natasha had time to notice the wry note to her voice before she went on: “An admirable trait, one we would all do well to cultivate. It does no good to brood on past wrongs. You mortals of Midgard, for example, must find it hard to forgive Loki for the destruction he wrought on your planet. But he, too, has much to forgive."

She smoothed out her skirts and then paused, looking down at her hands in her lap. She sat so still that Natasha might have mistaken her for a statue. In the moonlight, the curve of her throat and the sweep of her cheek glowed as though they had been carved in marble.

"He faced an exile of his own, you know," the All-Mother said thoughtfully. "When Thor was banished it was, in part, as a result of Loki's actions - actions that had terrible consequences. Loki slew the king of Jotunheim, and broke a peace that had lasted a thousand years. When the All-Father would not condone his actions he was," - she made a brief motion with her hand, "-not cast aside, but set adrift. Friendless. Alone. Until he arrived on Midgard."

She drifted into silence, apparently lost in her own thoughts, and Natasha was grateful for the respite. She took advantage of the pause to gather her own thoughts, though she hardly knew where to begin.

It was too much to take in all at once. This wasn’t chess, or poker, or any of the other stupid games that people compared intelligence work to. It was more like a confusion of jigsaw puzzles, all shaken up together and spread out over the floor, each piece holding a fragment of a larger image. Jane Foster. Loki. Frigga, from Vanaheim. The All-Father and his columns of golden warriors. She didn’t know how to fit them together. She wished she hadn’t drunk so much mead. She wished the All-Mother would stop _smiling_ at her like that.

“But it is late!” the All-Mother exclaimed suddenly. She rose to her feet and, obedient to the tacit dismissal, Natasha rose as well. “Your friends must be worrying, and wondering what has become of you.”

Natasha curtsied, and hesitated. Maybe she was being stupid. The inside of her head felt thick in a way that could not be blamed entirely on the mead. But if she didn’t ask, she would never know. Not for certain.

“You said… you heard about me from your son.”

“Yes.”

There was nothing the All-Mother had said to her that she might not have heard from Thor. And yet –

“I thought he was forbidden to have visitors.”

The All-Mother’s eyes narrowed, and Natasha knew that she had passed the test.

“There is no lock nor bar strong enough to keep a mother from her child.” Her gaze slipped past Natasha and seemed to rest on the fountain in the center of the courtyard. “Loki has made many mistakes. But he is young. He will learn. He will change.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“He will. He _must_.” For the first time during their conversation the All-Mother’s tone grew sharp. “Change is not a luxury for those such as he and I, or even _you_ , Natalia Romanova, who must live and break bread with those who were once our enemies. It is a _necessity_.”

Certainly if you wanted to avoid death or imprisonment it was. Natasha thought of SHIELD's prisons. The Raft. The Cube. The Fridge. She had missed seeing the other sides of those walls by a hair’s-breadth. By the width of an outstretched hand.

“One last thing, before you go...”

The All-Mother reached up and broke off a hair from her head. Taking Natasha’s hand in hers, she wrapped it deftly around her finger. The ring it made was so thin and so pale that it almost vanished against her skin. It felt like something that belonged in a fairy tale, one where a witch gave the heroine a talisman that she could use to burn her enemies to death.

(That had been Natasha's favourite kind of fairy tale, when she was little.)

“Wear this, as a token of our meeting.” Her hands were warm and dry as they rested on Natasha’s shoulders. “And, should you ever wish to speak again – if ever I can help you, my child…” She leaned forwards and brushed her lips over Natasha’s forehead. It was a tender, even motherly gesture. “Only think of this moment, and I will be there. I will _always_ be there.”

//


	10. Chapter 10

As Natasha made her way back to Sif’s room, she saw the cat. Its tail lashed back and forth as it crouched at the foot of a pillar, a dark object held between its front paws.

It lifted its head and looked back over its shoulder at her as she passed. The light from the lanterns on the wall caught its eyes, turning them golden and weirdly flat.

Black feathers spilled across the stone floor. A gust of wind caught them and lifted them up into the air like flakes of snow.

Natasha fled.

She ran all the way back to Sif’s room, where she dove into the bed and pulled the blankets up over her head, as if they could provide protection from the Shakespearean levels of family drama she had become involved in.

All they had to do was find Jane Foster. That was all Natasha wanted to do – find her, and get the hell out of Asgard without agreeing to anything that SHIELD or the rest of Midgard would later regret, but that was looking more and more impossible by the second. If Dr. Foster was stuck in some transdimensional netherworld like everyone seemed to think, then they were going to need to use the Bifrost to get her back. But using the Bifrost was going to require going to the All-Father and _begging_ him for help. Making some sort of a deal with him. Giving him something he wanted.

But Midgard didn’t have anything the All-Father wanted, not anymore. The Tesseract was the most powerful object Natasha could think of, and they had just – given it away.

More to the point, Midgard didn’t have anything that the All-Father couldn’t take by force, if he really wanted it. She remembered standing on the bridge in New York, and the heavy feeling of despair in the pit of her stomach as she had looked up at the rift in the sky and seen the thousands of Chitauri it was vomiting forth. Fighting them had felt futile. How much worse would it have felt worse if they had been facing battalions of well-armed, well-disciplined Einherjar guards instead?

But the All-Father was one of the good guys. He would never attack them. Or if he did, it would be because they had majorly screwed up. The way Jotunheim had, and Svartalfheim, and even Vanaheim, probably.

Natasha wondered how close they had come to seeing those golden Einherjar guards marching down the streets of New York. How much more could SHIELD have done with Project Pegasus before they atracted the attention of the All-Father, and he decided he had to stop them? Svartalfheim had tried to end the universe. Jotunheim had invaded another realm. What was Midgard allowed to do, before the All-Father drew the line and said: this far, and no further?

No, it was far better not to ask the All-Father for anything. If they had to get help, it would be far better to use someone over whom they had some kind of a hold. Someone they could bargain with. Someone who _wanted_ something.

And there was at least _one_ person who believed that Loki could change…

She pulled the blankets more tightly over her head and tucked her knees up against her chest. A rough beat pounded inside her skull. She pushed it away and focused instead on how warm and safe it felt in bed and how soft the blankets were. Sif’s room was quiet and still. Someone had been in while they had been at the feast to tidy the dresses off the bed and light the lamp, which cast a warm glow that Natasha could see through the blankets. The air was warm and smelled of a mixture of perfume and the ointment that Sif used to treat strains and bruises.

The door to the room opened. Unsteady footsteps padded over to the bed.

“Lady Natasha?” Sif inquired solicitously, patting the assassin-shaped lump under her covers. “Are you well? I did not realize you had left the feast.”

“Oh. Yes. I’m fine.” Natasha uncurled and sat up in bed, feeling sheepish. “I was just – tired. It’s been a lot to take in. It was a great feast, though,” she added quickly. “Thank you for the dress.”

“That is well. I am glad you enjoyed yourself.” Sif sat down on the edge of the bed and Natasha moved over to give her space, but she didn’t lie down, only sat with her hands between her knees.

The lamp shed a soft, warm light. Natasha studied the line of Sif’s back.

Hazarding a guess, she asked: “Did _you_ enjoy it?”

Sif hunched her shoulders. She didn’t speak and Natasha didn’t push her to. She still had her hair up, and so Natasha sat up on her knees and drew the pins out one by one, laying them in a row on the table beside the bed. She ran her fingers through the thick, dark locks to shake them out, and hunted about for a brush.

It was nice to sit together in the little room, lit by the light of the single lamp. Sif’s hair smelled of wood smoke from the banquet hall and, under it, of the scented oil she had dabbed behind her ears. Natasha brushed it slowly, being careful not to tug too hard.

“Prince Thor will accompany you back to Midgard, to search for Jane Foster,” Sif said eventually. “Although it is against the All-Father’s orders.”

Natasha gathered Sif's hair together and ran her hands over it so that it lay flat against her back. “Yes. He told me he would.”

Sif’s hands curled themselves into fists. “ _Why?_ ”

“He said that it was a debt he had to repay. I think it’s something that’s important to him.”

“More important than his duty? Than the oaths of loyalty he swore to his father?” Her voice broke. “More important than his _people_?”

She spoke, Natasha realized, not only with her own voice, but with one that could have belonged to all the Aesir; to the Vanir whom Thor had delivered from the Marauders; and to all the people of all the realms he was sworn to protect. Natasha was pretty sure that Thor loved Jane Foster, but to the rest of the Realms, it wouldn’t matter. He was _leaving_ them.

It was a child’s cry, born from the primal fear of being left alone – but what was the All-Father, except a father to every sentient creature on the World Tree? And a father couldn’t play favourites.

Still, knowing full well that convincing Thor to stay behind would be like persuading water to run up-hill, Natasha tried to reason with her. “Is it really so bad if he leaves? I mean, he won’t be gone for long.” She hoped. “And the Nine Realms have you to defend them, and the Warriors Three, and all of Asgard’s armies. And the All-Father will still be there.”

Sif didn’t answer immediately. After a bit, she lay down on the bed with her back to Natasha. Natasha lay down next to her, her eyes following the curve of her shoulder in the dim room.

She had lain just like this in the dormitories of the Black Widow Program, curled up next to one of her sisters. The lighting in the dormitories had been like this too, low and soft and bright enough to make the work of the night-time observers easy as they patrolled between the bunks. There had been cameras and random bed-checks as well, but they were as ineffectual as the handcuffs that chained them to the bedposts. They were Black Widows – spies, trained in stealth - and no matter how many eyes were on them, the nighttime had been the time for private jokes and shared confidences, and secrets whispered into a sympathetic ear.

As it had been then, so it was now. When Sif spoke, it was in a low voice that wasn’t much above a whisper.

“The All-Father is old. He will fall into the Odinsleep soon, and Thor must take his place.”

 _The All-Father is old_. It wasn’t much of a secret. Natasha had seen as much herself, and so could anyone admitted into the royal presence. But with Marauders out pillaging with impunity, and a broken peace treaty with Jotunheim, perhaps it had become one – a thing to be whispered behind your hand, or not spoken of at all. _The All-Father is old_.

“The last time that Thor defied him,” Sif said, “the All-Father stripped him of his powers and cast him out of Asgard. If he is disobeyed again, his wrath will be terrible.”

And Thor, off gallivanting about on Midgard, wouldn’t even be there to see it – but his friends would be.

“I’m sorry,” Natasha said, honestly.

“I asked him – I _begged_ him to allow me to accompany him, and he refused.” Sif turned her head and buried her face in her pillow. “This is all Loki’s fault,” she exclaimed, her voice thick with anger. “He has weakened the realm by his selfishness!”

There wasn’t anything Natasha could say to that. She rubbed Sif’s back instead.

“It’s a debt,” she said again. She felt that she was on more familiar ground there. “A debt is a heavy thing to carry. It’s better if Thor crosses it out now, instead of letting it weigh him down.”

Judging by the tension in her shoulders, Sif was not convinced. Natasha tried to explain.

“The work I do for SHIELD… that’s how I repay my debts. I’ve done some bad things with my life, but what I do with them – it helps to make up for it, in some ways. I’m not saying that Thor has anything like that on his conscience, but I – I understand how important this might be to him. Why he has to do it.”

Sif moved away from her, and Natasha drew back her hand, afraid that she had said or done too much – but she only turned over onto her side, so that they were face-to-face.

“How long have you served SHIELD, Natasha?” she asked, curious.

Were Aesir years the same as Midgardian ones? She didn’t know. “A while.”

Sif lifted her hand and drew her finger over her temple, tracing the line of her hair. “And how long do you expect it will be, before the term of your service is up?”

Natasha blinked harder. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

She didn’t know. X number of years at SHIELD against Y years in the Department, and she didn’t know. She didn’t even know what all of the red in her ledger stood for. She remembered ballet lessons. Who knew how much she was forgetting?

For a time, Sif was quiet.

"I am pledged to serve the All-Father," she said at last, "and fight in his battles and his wars. But I do it, not because I feel I must, but because I wish to. It seems a hard thing, to labour with no end in sight, and as a debtor besides. I am sorry."

Natasha tried to smile. It was a weak effort. She was glad the dim light hid her expression. "That's because you don't know everything I've done."

Sif seized her hands. "I don't have to know what you've done," she said earnestly. "I know _you_."

And somehow, regardless of everything else she had said or done, _that_ felt like the biggest lie Natasha had told that evening.

//

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are interested in reading about Natasha's Black Widow Program-era childhood shenanigans, [Black Snow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2260611) takes place in the same universe as this series. Cheers!


	11. Chapter 11

By the time the sun rose the following morning, Natasha knew what she had to do.

She slipped out of bed, leaving Sif still sleeping, and picked out a clean dress to wear. As she washed, she spared a moment to wonder where Clint and Tony had ended up. Probably under the tables in the banqueting hall – it had been that kind of a night.

Closing the door to Sif’s room as quietly as she could behind her, Natasha went looking for the All-Father.

She found him in a room that was a world away from the hall in which they had feasted last night. This one was airy and full of light, with high, arched windows that looked out onto one of the palace gardens. Birds sang outside and the fresh, cool air helped to banish the memory of last night’s smoky bacchanal. The high-backed chairs around the long table in the center of the room were all empty except for the largest, where the All-Father sat with his elbows on the table, juice dribbling into his beard as he bit into what looked like a purple orange.

Natasha’s footsteps rang against the highly polished floors as she walked up to the head of the table and dropped down onto one knee. She kept her head bowed, but she could feel the All-Father’s single eye on her as she knelt, and hear the steady sound of his chewing.

“Your obeisance is not required at this hour of the morning, Lady Natasha,” he said kindly, after he had swallowed. “Rise and join me.”

Natasha did not rise. “Sire,” she said, her eyes fixed on the geometric pattern of the tiles under her knee. “I beg a boon.”

The All-Father put down his orange, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. The legs of his chair scraped against the floor as he pushed it away from the table and turned to face her.

“I have an inkling of what you would ask,” he said at last. “My son tells me that you are not ruled by kings on Midgard. Perhaps, then, you do not understand that my decisions are final and my orders are to be obeyed. Thor remains here, on Asgard, where he belongs.”

“Sire, it is not only Thor whom I would request -.”

“Lady Sif remains as well,” he interrupted, betraying a hint of impatience. “I will not allow you to pluck the finest warriors from my army to serve your own purpose. What is the disappearance of a single mortal woman to the All-Father, who has billions of souls under his protection? The other realms look to me to protect them. What will they say if they see me devoting my attention to so insignificant a matter in such troubled times as these?”

“What do they say now, when the king of Jotunheim lies slain by one whom you called your son?” she countered. “When the peace that lasted a thousand years was shattered by one of Asgard’s princes?”

The texture of the air changed, becoming thick and greasy. Natasha recognized the feeling of a build-up of electricity, and the increase in pressure that presaged a storm. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

The All-Father was angry.

“Have care, Lady Natasha,” he warned.

“Loki’s defiance has sparked rebellion across the Nine Realms,” she reminded him, ignoring the warning. “As long as he remains your prisoner, he defies you.”

“You tell me what I already _know_!” The All-Father brought both his fists down onto the dining table with a bang, upsetting a carefully balanced display of fruits. “By all the laws of Asgard he ought to be dragged forth and _executed_! But…” He dragged in a rough breath and closed his eyes, calming himself by a visible effort. “I am a husband, as well as a king. And so Loki will remain imprisoned.”

So Loki was alive only through the All-Mother's intervention. Natasha filed that little bit of information away as she stood, meeting the All-Father’s eyes for the first time.

“What you ought to do is _curb_ him,” she insisted. “Collar him, and bring him to heel. Let the other realms see him humbled in the service of the All-Father. Let them see that he _failed_.”

The All-Father’s single eye narrowed. Natasha held his gaze without flinching.

One of the purple oranges that had rolled free of the upset bowl had fetched up against the All-Father’s plate. He picked it up and turned it over, considering.

“What is it that you are suggesting, exactly?" he said slowly. "What would you do, Shield-maiden, were you in my place?”

Outwardly, Natasha remained calm, but inwardly she exulted. She had spun her web, and now she felt its threads vibrating as her prey struck it.

She hoped she was doing the right thing.

“There are chains in your treasure rooms with the power to strip Loki of his magic,” she pointed out. “I saw them used on Midgard. Even without his magic, Loki’s knowledge of the paths between the realms is unparalleled. Release him into our custody, and let us use him to find Dr. Foster. Loki sought to conquer Midgard: he owes us a debt. Let this be how he pays us back.”

The All-Father looked thoughtful. “You are more correct than you know,” he said. “There is a custom among the Aesir called the Weregild – the man-price. A life taken must be repaid, either in coin or, as you say, by service…” He began to peel the orange. “Even without his magic, Loki will be dangerous. What guarantee do I have that I will get my prisoner _back_?”

She almost had him. A few strands of silk more, and he would be secure. “If you cannot trust us, trust Thor.”

The All-Father flicked a piece of orange skin from his fingers. Natasha held her breath.

“I have explained to you already why I cannot spare Thor,” he said wryly. Natasha began to breathe again. “Is it my memory that is failing, or yours?”

“Thor will be the All-Father one day. A day in the very far future, it is to be hoped,” she added politely. “Grant him custody of Loki, and let the other realms see how implacable he is towards any who threaten the peace of the Nine Realms. Regardless of his personal relationships.”

The All-Father was silent. The pile of peelings next to his plate grew larger.

“When my son last returned from Midgard,” he said at last, “he said that your people were led by a man dressed all in black, a warrior of great cunning who was scarred like myself.” The single eye glittered, bright as obsidian. “I wonder that he could have been so blind.”

Natasha instinctively dropped her eyes. “He wasn’t wrong. That man is my – my king,” she said, fumbling over how to explain what Director Fury was to her. “I serve him as your warriors serve you.”

The All-Father put down the orange and sat back in his chair. “You stand before me as you have, you speak to me as you have spoken, and _you_ have a king?” he exclaimed, amused. “Perhaps I have underestimated the formidability of Midgardians.” He wiped off his fingers and stood. “I shall hold an audience with you and the others in the throne room before you depart. You shall know my decision then.”

“Sire,” Natasha murmured, bowing as he swept past her.

Before she left the dining hall, she snagged a napkin and a handful of fruits off the table. Formidable Midgardians may have been, but everyone needed to eat.

//


	12. Chapter 12

Something was on fire.

Clint came awake at once. He bolted upright, and smacked his head hard against the underside of a wooden bench.

“Aargh,” he said, when he could trust himself to speak. “Bench.”

“Aargh,” he said again, once his stomach had woken up sufficiently to tap him on the shoulder and indicate that sudden movement really should not be on his agenda for the day, “ _hangover_.”

Clutching his much-abused head with both hands, he carefully rolled out from underneath the bench where he had been sleeping and staggered to his feet.

The dining hall looked like a battlefield, shortly after the departure of the victorious army. Bodies lay strewn about over tables and benches and barrels. The splintered legs of furniture stuck up like shattered flagstaffs. Here and there an out-flung arm still clutched a tankard, caught in the act of a final quaff. Clint was only saved from wondering if Asgard’s finest were sleeping the sleep of the dead by the snoring, which was loud enough to rattle the windows and shake the pennants hanging from the rafters. Apparently a blocked nostril or a deviated septum were mandatory requirements for anyone wishing to join the All-Father’s service.

He essayed a careful step, and promptly trod on what had to be the only tankard to have made it through the feast intact. His foot rolled out from under him and he only just managed to catch himself before he fell, while his stomach reminded him once again, with great urgency, that moving was not his friend.

Shuffling his feet along the floor, he cautiously made his way through the dining hall, doing his best not to tread on anyone along the way. The burning smell that had woken him turned out to be coming from the fire pits. The spits had stopped turning long ago but the mangled remains of the enormous joint of meat they had been feasting on still hung over the smouldering coals, its underside charred to a very unappetizing charcoal black. The stench of it made him gag.

A large bird took off from the joint of meat in an explosion of wings and feathers that tore through the smoky air of the hall. Stifling a curse, Clint grabbed a nearby barrel to keep himself from falling. The raven flapped heavily up to perch on one of the rafters overhead.

“ _Huaugh_ ,” it coughed, bobbing its head and regarding him with a baleful eye. The sound cut through his skull like a hatchet. “ _Huaugh, huaugh_.”

Clint staggered over and shoved his head into one of the buckets of water that were set up nearby. He scrubbed the worst of the grime off his face and glared, dripping, at the bird.

“ _Huaugh, huaugh_.”

“Aw, give it a rest.”

“ _Huaugh!_ ”

//

Clint Barton’s life, before SHIELD, had been pretty rough, what with the alcoholic parents, convict brother, evil circus ringleader and stuff. He didn’t like to dwell on it.

His life after SHIELD, had been – well, mostly it had been deeply weird. He had never had what you might call a normal nine-to-five job, but he was pretty sure that they didn’t involve, say, super powered men in spandex, Nazi space-weapons, or _actual magic_. Working for SHIELD had got him involved in a lot of face-meltingly bizarre stuff, and Clint got through it all by affecting an outer matter-of-fact detachment while inwardly screaming.

Here I am, he would say to himself, a simple man from Iowa, watching a man from space struggle to lift a magic hammer.

Here I am, a high-school dropout and ex-carnie, shooting arrows at aliens on flying scooters while a space whale crashes into the financial district of Manhattan.

Here I am, Clint thought as he finished answering the call of nature and looked around to make sure no one had seen him, urinating against a topiary bush on a super technologically-advanced world that doesn’t seem to have invented indoor plumbing. Amazing.

He zipped up his pants and stepped out from behind the bush. Satisfied that no one had seen him, he was just beginning to stride away, doing his best nonchalant whistle, when he remembered the Observer.

He looked up at the sky.

“It was an emergency?” he hedged, as apologetically as he could, and fled back inside.

//

This done, he set out to find (he hoped) breakfast.

Instead he found the palace library, and Tony Stark. The inventor was halfway up one of the tall, wheeled ladders that ran on tracks along the bookshelves and, judging by the scene of academic devastation that lay around him, he had been in the library for some time. The empty Iron Man armour was propped up in the corner, its head tilted forwards like a marionette’s.

"Hiya, Tony," Clint said. "How're things?"

"Amazing!" Tony enthused. He had an open book propped against one of the rungs of the ladder, and was flipping rapidly though its pages. "These star charts are thousands of years old, can you believe it? And there are maps here of other dimensions, things we're only just starting to discover - wish I could understand more of it though, this writing is a bitch to read -."

Clint wandered up to the long, low table that ran between the bookshelves. It was covered with massive gilt scrolls, held open by candlesticks and ink pots, and stacks of books that lay about in piles with interesting passages in them marked by the insertion of other, smaller books. Dust filled the air. It filtered through the thick shafts of early morning sunlight that cut through the dark, high-ceilinged room, and made his nose run.

“I’m surprised you’re so excited about this stuff.” He turned over a couple of pages in the book nearest to him. It was heavy on the illustration and light on text, like a children’s book. Just his speed, then. “I thought you’d find books… I don’t know, old-fashioned or something.”

“Data is data, my friend, whatever form it takes. Besides, I can appreciate the classics.” He gave a kick and sent the ladder rolling across the floor. It bumped to a stop next to Clint, and Tony peered down at him with an uncomfortably penetrating expression. “I’m surprised to see _you_ in here, actually. What are you doing messing about with books at this hour of the night?”

Clint shrank under the sudden scrutiny. “It’s _morning_. I was looking for breakfast.” He stared back, suspicious. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

Tony raised an eyebrow, ignoring the question. “This is a library,” he said, as though to a dim but well-meaning child. “No food in the library.”

Clint shrugged, feeling defensive. The truth was, he didn’t really know how he had ended up in the library. He had just… followed his feet, and they had carried him here. He had been grateful for it, at the time. The library was dark and cool, and if Tony hadn’t been there it would have been quiet. The dust that lay over everything suggested that these particular shelves were rarely visited, and he could believe that on any other day, he could have settled in for a nice, long, uninterrupted nap. But he had never been here before. He couldn’t have _known_ that.

Could he?

He looked down at the book in his hands. Worryingly, he was beginning to get the creeping impression that he had seen it before. Which was _impossible_.

Up on the ladder, Tony twisted his head to get a better look. “What’s that? It looks like a teletubby.”

He wasn’t wrong. Most of the page was dominated by a large illustration featuring a group of figures in black armour, wearing silver masks with round eyeholes and pointed ears. They were standing in front of another silver teletubby who was holding a sort of black box, inside of which a red fire twisted and writhed. Black, rune-like letters ran around the border of the page.

Clint ran his fingers over them, watching the pictures move under his hand. Dimly, there stirred in his mind the memory of another hand, slimmer and more delicate, moving over that same page, and a soft voice:

“Born of eternal night,” he repeated, speaking in time with the remembered voice inside his head, “the Dark Elves come to steal way the light…”

Tony nearly fell off his ladder. “You can _read_ it?!”

“What? No!” Cint slammed the book shut and shoved it away. “Of course not!” He glared at him. “Can’t you read it? You’ve been in here for hours!”

“It’s cute that you think I’m some kind of linguistic super-genius who can learn languages overnight, but I can’t read _most_ of what’s on these shelves. There are books here from places we’re only just _learning_ about! Eir’s been translating for me, but she’s a busy lady. Sharp, too. Makes me feel like I’m six years old and can’t be trusted not to run with scissors.” He clutched the ladder and grinned sappily. “I think I’m in love. But come on,” – he twisted around and yanked a book off the shelf at random. “Try another one!”

Clint recoiled from the book as though it was another flagon of mead. “No!”

“This is for the benefit of mankind! You could increase the sum of human knowledge a hundred times over with what’s in these books! Just take a peek at this – whoa, is this an Asgardian sex manual?” He snatched the book back and examined it intently. “It is! I’m not kidding, this is like a Viking Kama Sutra or something, Clint, we mortals _need to know_ what’s in this book -.”

“I’m not doing it!” Fumbling around in his pockets, Clint found his sunglasses and jammed them on his face. Feeling marginally more protected, he glared at Tony, who pouted.

“Fine, but I’d just like to point out, this is very selfish of you.” He looked wistful as he slid the book back onto the shelf, and shook his head. “I’m telling you, if that’s what brainwashing can do for a person, _I_ wouldn’t mind having Loki in _my_ head for a -.”

“Don’t say that.” Clint scrambled to his feet, his heart pounding in time with the headache hammering at his temples. “Don’t say that.”

Tony stared. “Whoa, easy. I’m just saying, it looks like there might have been some kind of psychic bleed-through from Loki’s scepter-thing -.”

“DON’T SAY HIS FUCKING NAME.”

By his sides, Clint’s hands had curled into fists. He was standing in front of Tony, his feet apart, his shoulders square, and inside a mean little part of him was gloating over the stupid look on Tony’s face as he gaped at him, his mouth hanging open like he was catching flies – but mostly he just wanted him to stop, he didn’t want to joke about it, didn’t want to talk about it, because if he heard that name again he would – he was going to –

He was probably going to throw up, he realized, but that was at least fifty percent due to all the mead.

“Well, really!” Clint whipped around, already feeling pre-emptively guilty – it was that kind of voice – and had to bite his tongue to stifle a moan as his brain sloshed against the inside of his skull. A lady was looking at him and Tony, and her expression of thin-lipped disapproval was exactly the one he remembered from his first-grade teacher. “I suppose some allowance must be made for your strength of feeling, but I must ask you to express yourself more _temperately_ , young man.”

“Eir, my treasure!” Tony tumbled precipitously off the ladder and pretended to kiss her hand with an exaggerated bow. “It was a mere nothing, a little bit of horseplay between friends. And to what do we owe the pleasure of your divine company?”

Eir snatched her hand away, but she looked more flattered than annoyed. “I had come to inform you of the All-Father’s announcement, but it seems that you already know of it. You should hurry if you are to reach the throne room in time.”

“As delighted as I am to be credited once again with the possession of knowledge that I do not, in fact, possess,” Tony said, “I have to ask: what are you talking about?”

A frown creased Eir’s brow. “Loki, of course.”

Clint felt the blood drain from his face.

“The All-Father has decreed that he is to accompany you back to Midgard, to help you find this Jane Foster,” she said, over the rushing noise that filled his ears. “As your prisoner. The All-Father is to bind him with the enchanted chain of Gleipnir in the throne room a few minutes from now. I shall escort you, of cour- where is he going? He does not know the way!”

//

Clint didn’t know the way to the throne room, but he made it there anyways.

He tried not to think too much about what that meant.

The massive double-doors that led to the throne room were still closed, with a pair of golden-armoured guards flanking them on either side. A small crowd of Asgardians had gathered in the antechamber as they waited for them to open and a few of them looked curiously at him as he darted past them.

He spun in place (but not too fast), looking for Natasha. Surely someone would have told her to come to the throne room. She must have woken up by now, she hadn’t drunk nearly as much as he had last night – but she hadn’t been in the banquet hall that morning. Where had she _slept_?

Clint girded himself to plunge into the crowd, prepared to start a systemic search, when an Asgardian woman in a blue dress suddenly turned around and grabbed him by the arm. Shocked by the unexpected physical contact, Clint whirled around to face her, and suffered a second shock.

It was Natasha.

Clint felt as though the carpet had been yanked out from under him. No matter how many times he saw it, he still couldn’t get used to how easily she became someone else, someone who wasn’t the Natasha he thought he knew. With the dress and her hair and everything, she looked Asgardian – she looked like she _belonged_.

He was being ridiculous, he knew. After all, she had been dressed up last night, too. But at the feast it had been different, like it was a party that she had put on a costume for. In the daylight, it felt more serious.

She grinned impishly at him and slipped her arm into his, looking fresh and put-together and like she hadn’t spent the night passed out in a puddle of something sticky. She even smelled like – well, Clint didn’t know what she smelled like, but it sure as hell wasn’t stale mead and alien barbeque.

“Good _morning_ ,” she said, apparently delighted to see him. “You looked like you were having fun last night. How did Fandral’s song go again? ‘Clynte thee valiant marksman/ Did sally forth one e’en…’”

“Aargh.” He grimaced at the memory and rubbed at his temple with his free hand. “Don’t remind me. But, listen, Nat…” He pulled her into a corner where they were granted some privacy by a massive statue of some warrior-hero or another. “Do you know what’s going on? Someone said they’re letting that – they’re letting Loki out of prison!”

Natasha’s face went blank. It was an expression – or rather, a lack of expression – that he had often seen before, the careful tucking away of all the usual little clues as to how she was feeling. Clint tried to think of it as a sign of trust. After all, knowing when she was hiding something was better than not knowing.

Mostly, though, he just wished he knew what was going on inside her head.

“The All-Father says he can control him,” she said carefully. “And if Dr. Foster is trapped somewhere other-worldly, he might be the only one who can find her.”

Clint wanted to shake her. She knew better than this, she knew what Loki was, he had _told_ her. “They don’t get it. He’s dangerous, Natasha, we can’t -.” He faltered, backtracked, and tried again. “It’s not just his magic, it’s how he thinks, he – we have to talk to the All-Father, convince him it won’t work -.”

She gave his forearm a sympathetic squeeze. Clint hung his head. Not for the first time his stupid, treacherous brain wished for Loki’s staff. He had never known absolute certainty like that before. He wished he had it now.

“The All-Father’s will is law,” she said. “His decisions are final.”

She said it quietly and calmly, as though it was the incontrovertible truth. Clint stared at her as she stood there draped in Asgardian fabrics, with Asgardian shoes on her feet and Asgardian earrings in her ears.

No, he thought, this isn’t you, this isn’t Natasha or the Black Widow, you can do anything in the world, Nat, I know you can –

… so why won’t you do _this_?

Natasha looked quizzically at him, and he realized that he had been staring. The double-doors had been thrown open and people were beginning to stream into the throne room. She tugged gently at his arm.

“Come on. We won’t get a good spot if we’re late.”

//

The room they entered was dominated by a single throne, a vast, elaborately decorated construction upon which the All-Father sat at his ease, surveying his subjects complacently as they approached between the rows of pillars. To his right stood Thor, Sif, and an older woman who Clint guessed was the All-Mother; to his left were Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun.

A space had been left for them at the front of the crowd. Tony was there already, and he waggled his eyebrows at Clint, as if to ask where he had gone rushing off to in such a hurry? Clint ignored him as he took his place beside Natasha. He could feel the eyes of the crowd on them. Amid the extravagantly dressed Asgardian lords and ladies, he knew he stood out like a sore thumb. He stared straight ahead and tried to pretend that he was in his sniper’s nest. He had to be calm. Watchful, and calm.

A hush fell over the crowd. Despite his best efforts, Clint tensed. His ears caught the sound of chains, jingling with every thudded footfall. His stomach turned over. He was going to be sick. He stared straight ahead, grateful for the sunglasses he was wearing, and pretended he couldn’t see the tall, black-and-green figure that came sauntering down the middle of the throne room, looking perfectly at ease in spite of the manacles around his wrists.

Two guards followed a step behind him, holding chains that were fastened to his belt and collar. His legs were shackled too, but that hardly mattered because the gag that he had been wearing the last time Clint had seen him was missing. What idiot had taken it off? Didn’t they _know_ who they were dealing with?

Loki stopped at the foot of the throne and stood looking up at his one-time family with a little half-smile that suggested he was enjoying a very good joke at everyone else’s expense. Natasha’s fingers closed around his wrist, and Clint realized that he had reached for the knife strapped to his thigh.

The All-Father struck the floor with the butt of his spear.

"My Lords and Ladies of Asgard,” he began, the hall resonating with the sound of his voice. “In light of the friendships that Prince Thor has formed, and as a testament to the bonds of love and trust that it is my dearest wish to see formed between our Realm and that of Midgard, I hereby grant temporary custody of the prisoner Loki to Lady Natasha, Lord Barton, Lord Stark and the other Agents of the Shield, in the hope that by his service, he will be able to make some small reparation for the violence he has wrought upon their realm.”

As if it was really that simple. As if he wasn’t going to turn around and slit all of their throats, and smile as he did it.

“I make but one condition,” the All-Father added. “The prisoner is to bear Gleipnir, which I will place about his neck myself, and which will prevent him from harming you and any of yours by his magic.”

At his gesture, a pair of Einherjar guards stepped forwards. Between them they held a padded box, which they tilted so that the crowd could see its contents. A low murmur of mingled surprise and approbation ran through the ranks of the Asgardians. Clearly this was serious stuff, but to Clint it didn’t look like much. He would’ve preferred a muzzle.

The All-Father reached into the box and drew out the collar. In his hands it looked as slender as a silk ribbon. “Forged by the dwarves of Nidavellir with great enchantments and mighty spells, Gleipnir cannot be broken by any weapon of Midgard nor of Asgard,” Odin intoned. “The prisoner Loki shall be bound with it until such a time as he returns to the palace with his debt discharged. Sons and daughter of Midgard, do you accept this charge?”

Beside him, Natasha drew in a breath. She stepped forwards – but it was Loki who spoke.

“ _I_ don’t accept it,” he said, his voice reaching clearly to every corner of the throne room. He sounded amused and faintly contemptuous.

The All-Father’s face (as much of it as could be seen between his beard and eye patch) flushed red.

“You have ill-timed this show of defiance,” he said crisply. “Consider who you are, and where you stand.”

“Oh, I’ve considered it very carefully!” Loki retorted. “And as I see it, this is the only avenue left open to me. You want my cooperation – well, you don’t have it. You want me to use my knowledge to assist these mortals – I won’t do it. You may strip me of my magic, but I’m not totally spineless." He sounded obscenely cheerful. “I shall simply lie.”

The All-Father’s knuckles were white as he grasped the arms of his throne. “You plot and scheme for my throne,” he said scathingly. “You commit murder, you wreak destruction on an inoffensive world, you are a prisoner sentenced to a life imprisonment with no chance of mercy, and yet you would reject this chance, this too-generous opportunity to make amends for your foolish crimes?!”

“Generous!” Loki exclaimed. “Is it _generous_ of you to loan me out like a dog? Is it generous to speak over my head and expect my unconditional obedience, and threaten me with blows when I balk at putting my head down and following the scent you would set me on? If it was a pet magic-user you wanted,” he sneered, his expression growing ugly, “a tame Jotun to follow at your heels, then you never should have pretended I was equal to your son! If captivity was to be my birthright -”

“Your birthright,” the All-Father spat, pronouncing each word with venom, “was _to die_!”

Loki paled: and then he pitched forwards, until he was brought up short by the chains held in his guards’ hands. “Then _kill_ me!” he shouted, and the words rang through the vaulted hall. “Kill me, or bury me again in your golden prison, for I _shall_ not change!”

The guards pulled hard on his chains, yanking him backwards, and Fandral and Sif’s hands flew to their weapons: but Odin wouldn’t have been the All-Father if he had been any kind of a coward. He surged to his feet, banging the butt of his spear on the floor.

“Take him from my sight!” he roared, spittle flecking his lips. The pupil in his single eye had narrowed to a pin-prick. “Drag the monster back to his cell, and let him _rot_!”

The throne room erupted into motion. The Asgardian lords and ladies streamed out of the room as the guards wrestled their prisoner into submission, anxious not to witness their king’s tantrum first-hand.

“So,” Tony said, as they were pushed and jostled by the fleeing crowd. “ _That_ was fun. Does anyone have any idea what was _supposed_ to happen?”

Clint looked challengingly at Natasha, daring her to say something – _anything_ \- but she stayed silent.

Thor pushed his way towards them, his brow creased with concern. “I am sorry,” he said when he reached them. “I do not fully understand what my father intended, but this was not meant to happen. I think it will be best if you leave for the Bifrost at once. Sif will take you,” he added, as the lady warrior shouldered her way to his side. “I fear the All-Father’s wrath will take some time to assuage. Take courage: I will join you when I can.”

“Come, Lady Natasha – Lord Barton,” Sif said, tugging at Natasha’s arm.

Just before they were ushered out of the throne room, Natasha looked back over her shoulder. Clint twisted around to follow her gaze.

The one still spot in the sea of activity was the All-Mother. Frigga stood on the steps below the throne with her hands clasped in front of her and her head bowed – whether in grief or in thought was impossible say.

And then the doors to the throne room closed behind them, and Clint saw no more.

//

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki's last challenge to the All-Father in this chapter is based off the Marquis de Sade quote "Kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change", which - I'm not a fan of Sade myself, but dang, what a great line!


	13. Chapter 13

Loki paced back and forth within the four walls of his prison cell.

Six strides, and he was brought up short by the enchanted latticework that confined him; a swift turn, and he could take another six strides before he was stopped again. As he turned over the scene in the throne room in his mind his pace quickened and his turns were made more frequently until he was almost turning in circles.

Right up until the moment he had been conducted into the All-Father’s royal presence, he had been undecided as to what he was going to do. As little as he liked the idea of returning to Midgard as an indentured servant, it was true that a collar was at least better than a cage. But when he had stood at the foot of the throne looking up at those whom he had once called Father – Brother – _friend_ – and, as if that wasn’t enough, to be stared at by those puling _thralls_ from Midgard -

A shudder ran through him. He could still feel those dispassionate grey eyes boring into the back of his neck, weighing and measuring him. In the expression of SHIELD Agent Natalia Alianovna Romanova he had seen something worse than contempt: it was indifference. It was as though not only did she not care about the threats he had made to her, she didn’t even find them _interesting_.

He whipped around and slammed his fist into the wall, which sparked and sent a sharp shock through his arm. _Monster_ , she had called him, with tears in her false eyes. As though she was any better: the Russian Avenger, with her ridiculous system of debts and credits, and her _lies_ –

Except that she had never lied, had she? It was the deceptive way she had of telling the truth that drew you out, and tricked you into saying more than you meant to…

“Do you value my counsel so little, then, that you reject it out of hand?”

He spun around. His mother’s projection stood in the center of the room regarding him gravely. Loki sneered.

“Counsel!” he exclaimed, feigning surprise. “I didn’t realize you meant to _advise_ me. It sounded more like an order. ‘Do as the All-Father says, dear’,” he mimicked (although who exactly he was meant to be imitating was unclear – certainly he had never learned those simpering tones from Frigga’s lips). “’Go help your brother, dear. Put on the nice collar your king has made for you, dear’.”

“If you think that’s what I was telling you to do, then you obviously weren’t listening,” his mother said acidly. “I lined up the pieces for you, I showed you your opening move, and now you’ve overturned the board! This is childish, Loki, mere childishness!”

“So this is a _game_ to you, is it? My freedom – my _life_ – whittled down to the pieces on a _Hnefatafl_ board?” The turn of phrase was an irrelevancy, but he seized upon it regardless. Drawing his heels together he bowed before her, twirling his wrists after the fashion of a particularly obsequious courtier he knew she disliked. “I am so glad that I can be _entertaining_ to you, my lady! What would you have me do next? Shall I sing? Dance? How else may I play the puppet for you?”

She looked away, angry. “You know that isn’t what I meant -.”

“You must be sorry I've outgrown letting you choose my clothing,” he reflected, “but for _you_ ,” – the All-Mother, he reminded himself, not _his_ mother, _never_ his mother, “- I’ll play along. What about that cloth you’ve been wasting your time embroidering, I could wear _that_ -.”

“Loki! _BE SILENT!_ ”

It was the closest she had come to yelling at him in the two thousand years of his life. He halted and stared at her, startled.

Frigga closed her eyes and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Spreading her fingers, she ran her hands down the front of her skirts.

“I sought to make you as comfortable as I can,” she said, when she had regained her calm. “I have interceded with the All-Father on your behalf. I have listened to you, sympathized with you, _advised_ you.” This time, when she smiled, the expression didn’t reach her eyes. “But perhaps you have no need for advice from an old woman such as myself. Perhaps you have new friends to assist you now…”

Loki felt himself grow hot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No?” She stepped closer and he had to steel himself not to give way before her. “The Chitauri. The Tesseract. Your sceptre. These aren’t the sorts of things one just _happens_ to pick up while tumbling through space. I may not have had the _extensive_ opportunities for _travel_ that you have, but you must give me credit for a little common sense! _Who gave you_ that power, Loki?”

He kicked at the pile of books by his feet and stared at the floor. “I like that!” he scoffed. “Do you think so little of me that you refuse to believe I could have acted alone?”

Frigga lifted her hand as if to touch his cheek, then hesitated and dropped her hand. “I do believe in you,” she said, softly. “You could rule kingdoms, if you set your mind to it. But not like that. Millions of warriors pouring out of the sky to attack a defenceless city?” A note of wry humour crept into her voice. “It’s the sort of plan I would expect your father to come up with, but I expected better from _you_.”

The comparison stung. “I am _nothing_ like Odin!” he snapped, backing away from her. “I am nothing like _any_ of you!” He grinned bitterly. “And that being the case, why _shouldn’t_ I seek allies elsewhere? If they offer themselves, why shouldn’t I use them to further my own ends?”

Frigga didn’t turn a hair in the face of his outburst. “Are you certain that’s what happened?” she asked. “Because it rather looks to me that you’re the one left holding the bag, my dear.”

He felt his stomach contract. “Stop it,” he ordered curtly.

“You know that what I say is the truth, Loki. You were taken advantage of. There need not be any shame in that. You were alone and heart-broken, and you let yourself be swayed by those who claimed to be your friends. But the mistakes of the past should not lead you to ignore counsel from one who knows you, and who has only your best interests at heart.”

“Oh, yes?” He spread his arms, encompassing the contents of his cell. “And was it in my _best interests_ to be confined and caged like the _thralls_ my brother keeps dragging home from other realms? Should I be grateful that your generosity extended so far as to give me room enough to stand?”

“Be sensible,” she snapped, her temper fraying. “If I had not begged the All-Father to be merciful, you would have been facing execution instead of imprisonment. Do you really think I had the power to do more? Did you see _two_ thrones up there in the palace? Is there a second crown of Asgard that I have left off among my jewels and my robes, do you think?”

His gaze fell on the books she had sent him, and he felt the inside of his throat grow hot and pinched.

“I never asked you to,” he said coldly. “I never asked you for anything. I owe you _nothing_.”

“You didn’t _need_ to ask me. I have always given you everything, everything that it lay in my power to give.”

“You’ve done enough. Leave me _alone_.”

“I only want you to make me _proud_ , Loki -.”

The words cut deep. They snapped the last thread of patience that he possessed. He spun on his heel and lashed out, wanting only to banish the projection from his cell – but instead his hand struck warm, solid flesh.

Loki fell back, appalled. Very slowly, Frigga lifted her hand and touched her cheek.

“You dare,” she said, very quietly. Her face was very pale except for where he had struck her. “You _dare_ \- !”

All his anger left him in a rush, like water from a broken jug. “ _No!_ I didn’t mean – I would never -!”

The slight, demure figure who had stood for so long in the All-Father's shadow seemed to grow. Frigga reared her head back, pride written in every line of her sharpening profile, and when she moved lighting flashed in the air behind her.

“I am Frigga of the _Vanir_!” she cried, and the words had thunder behind them. Every movement she made threw off white sparks that blazed in the dry air of the prison. Power coursed under her skin, like fire along a seam of coal. Loki cowered on the floor before her, one arm half-raised to guard against the expected blow. “I am the Vanadis! I have wielded power you cannot dream of! I have known strength of which you cannot conceive! My people _died_ under the swords of the Aesir, until to stop the slaughter I came to live under the roof of my enemy! I gave up _everything_ , and now you _dare_ to strike me? _You?_ ”

Her figure wavered, and began to shrink. She sank to her knees in front of him, her eyes filled with sorrow, reduced once again to the slight, mild figure he had always known.

“My _son_ \- !” she said, and he was undone.

It had been – how long? Time was a difficult thing to reckon, living as he had done in the spaces between worlds and in alien dimensions and inside the minds of others – but there had been his golden prison cell where he could be visited only by visions, and Midgard with its stupid monsters and exploding weaponry, and such long, long stretches of tedious _nothing_ … He had been fighting, always fighting, for so long, and now there was someone here in front of him who he _didn’t_ want to fight and what had he done - ?

“ _Mother_ ,” he burst out, and stopped, uncertain. He wanted to say something: he longed to apologize, but he didn’t know how. _Silvertongue_ , they called him, but the easier it was for him to lie, the harder it became to convince others that he was sincere.

Frigga smiled, very gently. She drew her fingers down his cheek, under his chin, and tipped his head up to meet her eyes.

“You were not born of my body but you are more my son than Thor will ever be,” she told him, soft and fond. “Both of us children of a defeated people, spoils of war carried off by the All-Father in the wake of his victories.”

Loki stared at her, half-fearing the further reproaches he knew he deserved – but when he searched her face, he found no accusation, no reproof, and he didn’t hold back any longer. He crept forwards into her open arms and she held him close. The warmth of her presence, the scent of her perfume and the texture of her robes all combined to draw forth memories of other times, long ago, when he had sought her out.

She stroked his hair, an echo of the caresses she’d bestowed on him when he was a child, and his fists clutched at the fabric of her dress.

“ _He’s_ the monster,” he muttered, wild. Odin the All-Father they called him, Odin the _Just_ , they didn’t know - “I’ll kill him, I swear – tell me, and I will -.”

Frigga checked his outburst with a murmur. “And yet he does love both of us, in his way.” She drew back a little and met his eyes, smiling. “And my life here has had its pleasures. But had I remained in Vanaheim I would have been more than a consort – I would have been a queen, with galaxies at my feet and a crown of starlight in my hair. Perhaps I shall still be queen, someday, and live to see _both_ my sons become kings.”

She pressed a kiss to his forehead, and he grew still.

For so long he had believed that he was alone, but he had been wrong. He could see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it had always been the two of them: both alone, both outsiders, while the rest of Asgard revolved on its own course around them. Two exiles – but exiled together.

“What shall I do?” he asked at last.

Frigga drew a deep breath, and exhaled. It sounded like a sigh.

“Suffer Odin to bind you with Gleipnir,” she advised. “Go with the Midgardians. Help them find your brother’s mortal lover. This is your chance to gain your freedom, Loki. Free yourself - and then, perhaps – maybe then – for me -.”

“Anything,” Loki asserted feverishly, although not without a qualm. There was something in Frigga’s face, a light in her eye, that in anyone else would have given him pause – but this was his mother, and he loved her. Whatever he had run from in times past, whether it was Odin’s harsh words, or Thor’s tactless jests, or the ill-concealed scorn of their comrades-in-arms – Frigga had been to him the one safe harbour, a fixed point in a changing world. He wondered how he could have forgotten. “Anything at all, only name it, and I swear to you, for you, I’ll do it -”

Frigga smiled. “My son,” she murmured tenderly.

Her arms tightened painfully around him. The whisper of her voice in his ear sent a cold shock down his spine.

“ _Burn Asgard to the ground_.”

//


	14. Chapter 14

When the rainbow light of the Bifrost had cleared away, SHIELD Director Nicholas Fury was there waiting for them. He fixed each of them in turn with a piercing glare, and Clint felt as though he’d been caught skipping class.

“My office," he snapped. " _Now_."

And he did have an office, in one of SHIELD's Airborne Mobile Command Centers, which had been brought in and parked in the middle of the empty lot. Clint had worked out of them in the past, but he didn't recognize this particular one, which was a modified Globemaster.

"We're borrowing it from a friend," Fury remarked when he noticed Clint staring at it, and smiled like had just made a joke.

Besides the plane, other changes had been made to the factory while they had been away. Most of the litter had been cleaned up, and a plywood fence had been erected, covered with glossy advertisements announcing the planned construction of Paradise Tower Condominiums. The building itself was covered with scaffolding and plastic sheets to hide it from prying eyes. If you didn’t know any better, you would never suspect that there was anything strange or suspicious about it at all.

It was similar to Natasha’s report in that respect. Clint kept his mouth shut as she gave a neutral, almost clinical run-through of what they had seen and heard while they had been on Asgard, but he thought he could see the gaps in it – periods of time that were skimmed over, and conversations that were summarized just a little bit too neatly. Anyone listening to her would have concluded that she was just as surprised as anyone when Odin made his announcement about Loki, but he knew that wasn’t true. There was something she wasn’t telling them.

It made him furious. The two of them had connived together over official reports often enough in the past that he _knew_ those tricks. She could fool the office grunts, but she couldn’t fool him. He knew her too well.

Or he thought he did.

There was probably a perfectly good reason for it, he told himself. She probably had a sensible, reasonable explanation for her behaviour, and he looked forwards to cornering her after the debriefing was over and making her tell him _all about it_.

“I’m sure if I just had more _time_ , we could’ve found some answers in that library,” Tony said as she finished. “More time, and that All-Speak they’re always on about -.”

“We already have an expert on the Convergence,” Fury interrupted. “I’ve got agents liaising with him now.”

That was a surprise. Clint hadn’t heard anything about any experts before. Natasha was trying to catch his eye, probably to see what he thought about this new development, but he stared straight ahead and pretended not to notice. He would talk to her afterwards. In _private_.

“Besides, we can’t expect Asgard to come running at every little sign of trouble. Otherwise,” Fury said, and smiled grimly, “they’re going to come running at every little sign of trouble.”

He and Natasha exchanged a significant look that went right over the heads of everyone in the room who hadn’t grown up as super-spy test-tube babies, and then Fury frowned.

“What the hell?” he muttered, rising to his feet, as the sounds of some sort of commotion outside filtered into the office.

Clint and the others joined him at the window.

Outside, the science techs were in chaos. They had been measuring and photographing the runes the Bifrost had left burnt into the asphalt, but now their white lab coats flapped like the wings of agitated chickens as they ran about snatching up equipment, knocking over tripods, and scattering papers. Two of them, running in opposite directions with their arms full of cameras, smacked in to each other at full speed and sat down hard on the pavement. They struggled to their feet, slipped, fell again, and ended up frantically crawling out of the way.

The reason for their odd behaviour was obvious. Beneath them, the scorched marks left behind by the Bifrost glowed like liquid gold.

By the time Clint and the others made it down the ramp and into the open air, the rainbow bridge was a hissing column of sound and colour with a distorted silhouette visible in its very center. The figure looked enormous, but as they ran across the pavement the light faded and dwindled into the familiar form of Thor, who stepped forwards to greet them, smiling wearily. And behind him –

Clint’s insides felt as though someone had grabbed them in a fist of ice and _squeezed_.

Loki shoved his way past his brother. His hands were unbound, but the burnished cord of Gleipnir glinted around his neck.

“Let’s get this farce over with." His eyes glitered as he looked from one to the other of them. “Show me this so-called portal.”

//

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much, everyone, for your kudos and comments, they are much appreciated! Questions, criticism, and corrections are all welcome - tho I make no guarantees that I will agree with them (and you can pry my Canadian spelling with its extraneous 'u's from my cold, dead hands!)
> 
> Thanks again, and cheers!


	15. Chapter 15

_The project in front of Jane is a box._

_Well. It’s a box the same way that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a bridge, or that Yggdrasil is a tree. Jane doesn’t always like those kinds of figures of speech, she can’t always see the point of them – how is a figurative tree any more sensible or beautiful than the energies, the connections, and the flow of power that ‘tree’ represents? And besides, you can only stretch those metaphors so far before they break – but she’ll let this one stand. It’s a puzzle box, and her job is to open it._

_Which sounds simple, but it’s nothing of the sort. She still hasn’t found the key, the calculation that will let her pry the lid off the thing, and more than once now she’s wished that she had Mjolnir so she could just smash it –_

_(- and it’s funny, but each time she’s felt herself go all soft and fuzzy-brained afterwards, as though someone had wrapped her up in the ridiculous hot pink Snuggie Darcy kept in the lab, because ‘it gets cold out here, seriously, deserts aren’t supposed to be like this!’. And when the warm, fuzzy feeling goes away it’s like she’s just woken up from a refreshing nap with all her frustrations drained away, except that she can’t tell if she was actually asleep or for how long, because nothing ever changes in the lab and there’s no way for her to mark the passage of time...)_

_But smashing won’t solve the puzzle because, and this is important, it is not a real box. The box is a metaphor. Really, it’s an equation – a set of equations – which, if she can solve them, will give her the information she needs to solve bigger, more complex equations, the existence of which the preliminary equations merely hint at._

_A more practical person would probably have thrown up their hands in disgust and flipped the table long before now, because what is the point? But Jane doesn’t think like that. She’s spent years chasing a purely theoretical transdimensional wormhole across the New Mexico desert. This sort of problem-solving feels almost soothing by comparison, like solving crossword puzzles._

_On the lab bench, buried under a stack of loose notepaper scribbled over with numbers and a lot of question marks, Jane’s phone begins to ring. She ignores it. Whoever it is can wait – she’s got a puzzle box to open first._

_//_


	16. Chapter 16

The first time Clint met the Avengers it hadn’t gone _great_ , what with the mind-control and hijacking the Helicarrier and everything.

To do them credit, none of them had ever held it against him, but he had felt like an outsider around them nevertheless. The problem was that he hadn't been there when the team had come together. It was like showing up to a party late, or getting into a television show only after it had become really popular. He was always playing catch-up.

Now the Avengers were assembling again, and Clint still felt like an outsider: but this time it was everyone _else_ who had _lost their goddamn minds_.

“You know this is a bad idea, right?” he said to Captain America, who had arrived on the latest jet full of SHIELD personnel to make the flight to London. “You’re going to tell Fury you’re not going along with it, right?”

To lend weight to SHIELD’s cover story that this was a construction zone Agent Sitwell had been running around handing out hard hats, but anyone hoping to dim the personal charisma of Steven Grant Rogers was going to have to do better than unflattering safety equipment. Even with a hunk of bright yellow molded plastic stuck on his head he looked like a goddamn Leyendecker painting. And surely the physical manifestation of Truth, Justice, and the American Way would be smart enough not to trust a raving megalomaniac like Loki, right?

But instead of the firm assurances of support followed maybe by a rousing rendition of _The Star Spangled Banner_ which Clint had expected, the Captain set his jaw and said:

“It wouldn’t be the first time SHIELD has worked with former enemies.”

Clint’s own jaw dropped. He couldn’t be – after all the times they’d worked together –

“Hey, that was a long time ago!” he protested, once he’d found his voice. “She’s done a lot of good stuff since then – and I know Rumlow’s always talking about that thing in Madripoor, but look, to be fair, it had been a _really_ long day, and he mostly tells that story to scare the junior agents shit…less…”

He trailed away, because Steve was looking at him funny.

“I was talking about Operation Paperclip,” he said. “What are _you_ talking about?”

“Uh,” Clint said, eloquently. “Operation what?”

“Paperclip,” Steve repeated. “You know. When SHIELD recruited German scientists after the war?” He sounded uncertain. “I thought everyone learned about it, you know, in school.”

“Must’ve been sick that day,” Clint mumbled, but Steve was looking past him, off into the middle distance.

“It was a compromise,” he said. In his mind’s eye, Clint could picture an American flag waving in the wind behind him, and hear the swell of music. “Like this is. But sometimes you have to make compromises to get the job done. And besides,” he added, descending back to the world of practical thinking before Clint could burst into spontaneous applause, “Thor and Director Fury wouldn’t be suggesting this if they didn’t think it would work.”

Clint wondered if he should point out that prior examples of Director Fury’s tactical planning skills included his master plan of sending a five-person team to punch an infinite army of aliens into submission. Granted, it had _worked,_ but he felt that giving Fury credit for it would only encourage him.

He had maybe spent too much time wondering. Steve was peering closely at him, his brow furrowed.

“Are you,” he said, and hesitated. “I know, with Loki, this must be -.” He stopped again, and visibly girded his loins, which was something for Clint to tell his hypothetical grandchildren about, someday, maybe. “Do you want… to talk? About…” He waved a hand, encompassing the factory they were standing outside of, a cluster of chattering science techs, and most of a flock of pigeons who were squabbling over half a sandwich they had extorted from one of the interns. “This?”

The prototypical figure of American manhood appeared to be sweating.

From long experience, Clint recognized these as the symptoms of the terminally emotionally-constipated as they attempted to follow the Steps Towards Open and Honest Communication as outlined in the pamphlet ‘Your Feelings And You’, which the SHIELD psychology department printed in bulk on a regular basis and handed out with an enthusiasm that was more than slightly manic. 

“There’s nothing to talk about,” lied Clint, who had personally been handed enough of those pamphlets that he could have wallpapered his apartment with them. “Everything’s fine.”

He didn’t miss the expression of relief that shot across Captain America’s face before he could cover it up with a firm and manly nod.

“Right. I’d better go and -.” He gestured towards the factory.

“Yeah, I’ll just -.” Clint jerked his thumb towards where the latest jet to arrive from New York was settling onto the tarmac.

They separated with alacrity, and mutual relief.

Okay, Clint thought, jigging from foot to foot as he waited for the jet’s ramp to descend and for the SHIELD personnel onboard to finish disembarking. Alright. So the Captain was a lost cause, but there was still hope. He could see one ray of jolly green sunshine in the whole situation, because even if no one was going to come to their senses long enough to send Loki back to Asgard with a boot up his ass, at least they had one person on their team who could punch him through a wall when (not _if_ ) he got frisky.

The memory of the Loki-shaped hole in Tony’s pent-house floor was one that had kept Clint warm on many a night.

A handful of additional SHIELD personnel came jogging out of the jet and headed into the factory. The ramp stayed down, but no one else came out.

Clint’s heart sank.

Inside the factory, the sound of voices led him up a cement stairwell to where Tony was surrounded by a crowd of hard hat-wearing scientists. Clint forced his way through the crowd, ignoring the dirty looks he got when he was a little too free with his elbows.

“Where’s Doctor Banner?” he demanded, when he was close enough to be heard.

“Doctor, doctor, doctor,” Tony muttered, not looking up from his tablet. “I have seven doctorates you know, I’m at least five times more doctor than anyone else on this team, and yet how is it that I never seem to merit anything more than a ‘ _Mister_ Stark’?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Clint, whose only diploma had been printed on A4 copier paper and had a smiley face sticker on it. “My heart bleeds, really, but _where is he?_ ”

Tony smiled. It was not a nice expression.

//

On board the Globemaster, in Fury’s field office, Natasha spun on her heel and resisted the urge to beat her head against the wall.

It was part of the legend that had grown up around the Black Widow that Agent Romanova wasn’t a team player, and like most parts of the legend, it wasn’t true. Natasha had always worked as a part of a team. There was always someone, off in the background, to provide support, intel and equipment, whether it was Clint and Agent Coulson as Strike Team Delta, or other members of SHIELD. Even when working undercover, she was only ever superficially alone: there was always a rendezvous point, an extraction plan, a dead-letter drop, or a safe house tucked away somewhere in the background. And before that –

Well. People could say what they liked about Department X, but they had always been very big on teamwork. You were never alone, when you were with the Department.

And now, technically, she had the Avengers.

Except that one of the Avengers was refusing to be a team player.

“Bruce,” she said into the phone in her hand, “what the hell are you doing? The pilot said he was refused clearance to land at Stark Tower! He had to come back without you! This is _Avengers’ business!_ ”

“That’s nice,” Bruce Banner said absently on the other end of the line, and then she heard static as he shifted the handset onto his shoulder and spoke to someone else. “ _Quanto custa o bilhete, por favor?.. ‘Brigado._ ”

“Is that – are you speaking Portuguese?” Natasha demanded. “Bruce, are you in _Brazil_ right now?!”

The overlong silence was only partly due to the lag in the long-distance call.

“Uh,” he said. “No?”

Natasha pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fury only sent for you a couple of hours ago, how are you in Brazil _already?_ ”

She felt irrationally upset. Really, they should have seen this coming. Bruce had a history of running away, from people and from problems, but – this was the _Avengers_.

He was _letting down the team_.

“Not that I am, you know, in Brazil or anywhere even remotely similar, but… it’s amazing what you can accomplish with a Black Amex card and an expedited visa.”

Natasha gritted her teeth. “I am going to murder Tony Stark,” she muttered.

“Oh! Oh, no, Tony had nothing to do with this,” Bruce assured her. She could hear the hum of voices around him, and the electronic bell that preceded some sort of public announcement. Was he in a bus terminal? An airport? Thousands of connecting flights left from Brazil, even if they got on his case now it could take _hours_ to track him down. “This is – well, ordinarily I wouldn’t mention it, I wouldn’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but she seemed to feel you owed her one... or she owed you one, I wasn't really following -.”

This time Natasha _did_ allow herself to lean forwards until her forehead was pressed against the wall. “Potts.”

And if _Pepper Potts_ was orchestrating Bruce’s disappearance, then their projected timeline for finding him was going to be measured in _days,_ not hours. _Damn_ it.

“Uh. Yeah. Got it in one, Agent.” Bruce sound amused, the bastard. He was _enjoying_ this. “And, look – I’m not saying I don’t think you can find me. I know you could, if you looked. But it’ll take time. And from the sounds of it, time is something you don’t have a lot of.”

He was right. From what Thor had said, the Convergence would end in a few days, and then the portal that Dr. Foster had disappeared through would vanish.

“Let’s be reasonable about this, Bruce,” she said. She could be reasonable. She had already very reasonably not thrown the phone out the window. “We’ll talk about it. Face-to-face -.”

She bit her lip as he laughed. “One-on-one? Like we did in Kolkata? No, sorry, Agent. I’m sitting this one out. Look, it’s nice that SHIELD wants me to help. But I really don’t think this is a job for my, ah, particular skill set.”

“Fury knows you agreed to assist SHIELD as a consultant only, and that’s all he wants. Our best guess is that Dr. Foster was trying to create a Foster Bridge here in London. Your expertise would be helpful. Ask Stark: he knows that’s all this is,” she said, and crossed her fingers that it w _ouldn’t_ be anything else.

“Right. I sure did a lot of consulting last time, after all.” There was a rustling noise as he adjusted the phone – hefting a backpack onto his shoulder, maybe. An electronic female voice announced last call for a departing flight. “It doesn’t matter what Fury says he wants me for. After – what happened in New York, if I’m anywhere near Loki I become a threat you can use to keep him in line. And I’m not okay with that. I know it – maybe it worked out for the best. But I’m not proud of it. And I’m not going to do it again. I’m out.”

Natasha took a deep breath. “Dr. Banner,” she said, keeping her voice professional, “has it occurred to you that your refusal to be involved with this mission, in whatever capacity, will put the lives of your team members at risk? Not to mention the lives of _everyone on Earth?_ ”

It was a low blow, but Bruce didn’t even flinch.

“Then I guess you need a Plan B,” he said calmly. “Trust me. I’m doing SHIELD a favour. You want to rely on the Other Guy? Bad idea. You can’t play with… big green smashy monsters without getting smashed yourself, some day. So to speak. Besides,” he added. “Fury doesn’t need me. You’re there, aren’t you?”

Natasha flushed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, more harshly than she had intended, and Bruce sounded surprised.

“I just thought that keeping Loki in line would be more up your alley than mine.” He seemed to realize what he had implied, and he added apologetically: “I mean, because you got the best of him in the Helicarrier. If anyone can, uh, out-twist that twisty bastard, it’s you.”

Natasha squeezed her eyes shut. She hadn't expected to be the one to talk to Bruce, especially not after what had happened between them in Kolkata, and later, in the Helicarrier. _Fury_ had been the one to dial the number, and then he had tossed her the phone when the call was picked up, either because it was his idea of a fun joke or, more worryingly, because he was still trying to set the two of them up, as though the Avengers was his own private captive-breeding program for deadly people.

Well, he was out of luck. He was going to have to get some more people with ovaries on the team if that was what he wanted.

There was a ball of something hot and tight inside her chest, and she told herself it was fine. It wouldn’t be the first time someone at SHIELD had used her as a threat. She was what Department X and the Red Room had made her, after all. She could be the stick, or the carrot.

“So that’s that,” she said, her voice flat.

“That’s that,” Bruce agreed easily.

“SHIELD thanks you," she said, "for your time.” And then, because if she had to be the Black Widow then she was going to be the _Black Widow_ , damn it, she added: “Have fun in Puerto Natales.”

The small, startled sound Bruce made just before she ended the call helped to make her day a little bit brighter.

But not by much.

//


	17. Chapter 17

Natasha knew a bit about ‘turning’ enemy agents. It had been something of a specialty within Department X. Some of their handlers had been true geniuses at manipulation, men and women who knew how to play on the human heart as though it was a Steinway piano.

SHIELD had never truly appreciated Department X's handlers. They said they used threats and torture and brainwashing, and yes, sometimes that was part of it, but mostly all that was ever necessary was… to talk. To weave a delicate web of truth and lies and hurt and comfort around the prospective double-agent, until they no longer knew fact from fiction. It might take days or it could take months, but eventually even the most rabid opponent could be brought around to Department X’s point of view. Half the time, once the handlers were done with them, they had been led through so many mental hoops that they were convinced they had come up with the idea of becoming double-agents themselves.

“There’s no difficulties about it!” one of the handlers had told her once, rubicund and expansive after a particularly successful conversion. “A human being, even the most single-minded one you can imagine, is a being of many parts. The trick to persuading them to do something, is to find the part of them that thinks like you do…”

So all Natasha had to do, then, was find the part of Loki that thought like her.

She wasn't looking forwards to it.

//

Currently, all of the parts of Loki were standing on the landing inside the factory watching as an otherwise undistinguished shoe tumbled endlessly end over end into the stairwell.

In spite of his evident impatience to get working, it had taken some time and quite a lot of running back and forth before he could be taken inside the building to the portal. No one was entirely sure how to treat him. Was he a prisoner? A consultant? He was Thor’s brother, and Thor was _right there_. On the other hand, he had tried to kill Thor at least twice (that SHIELD knew of). What, in other words, was SHIELD going to be allowed to get away with?

Natasha had turned out to be right in her suppositions about the crates that had been loaded into the jet back in New York. They held the Phase-Two prototypes, now modified to work without the Tesseract, and they had been uncrated almost before the light from the Bifrost had completely died away. Their appearance in the hands of the Special-Ops team, however, had the effect of making both Thor _and_ Steve look like sad Labrador retrievers, which made _everyone_ sad.

In the end, as a compromise, it had been decided that the Avengers would be Loki’s primary escort; the Special-Ops team would be back-up.

Which would have been fine, except that it was a very small landing.

The shoe fell past the landing again, passing through the beam of a laser that criss-crossed the space inside the stairwell. Dials jumped. Lights flashed. A small speaker somewhere played the opening notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

“Phase-space distortion,” announced one of the scientists, a curly-haired young man with a Scots accent who didn’t look old enough to be out during school hours without a note from his mother. “Anything dropped into the stairwell falls to the bottom, then reappears at the top. See?”

“It’s absolutely _fascinating_ ,” the other scientist exclaimed. “I mean – when you think about the possibilities of perpetual motion alone -.”

“It’s useless,” Loki interrupted.

“What do you mean?” Steve said. He shifted his shield from one hand to the other and moved to the side to give Thor some more space. Something crunched under his feet. “Oh! Sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” the second scientist assured him, hurrying forwards to inspect the damage. “Sorry about the mess, there was so much rubbish here when we arrived – and then we had the instruments to set up, and then -.”

She shot a very significant look towards the other end of the landing, where Stark was prying the back off a piece of scientific equipment with a screwdriver. The pieces of the Iron Man suit lay scattered around him like the aftermath of a very strange lobster dinner.

“Iron Man, I’m not sure you should be doing that,” Steve cautioned.

“Oh, it’s alright,” said the first scientist. “It’s a pleasure, really, to be consulting with Mr. Stark. After all, he’s -.”

“- Pepper Pott’s _boyfriend_ ,” his partner finished. She sounded starry-eyed.

“Well. Yes. That, too.”

“She was in the top ten of Forbes' list of influential women in the twenty-first century,” the scientist said, dreamily. “She came in ahead of _Angela Merkel_.”

The Scottish scientist coughed, smiled apologetically, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Fitz, by the way. This is my partner Simmons. Work partner, I mean. Not partner-partner. Of course. Ahaha.” He was sweating.

“It’s so nice to meet all of you!” Simmons exclaimed warmly, apparently oblivious to the awkwardness radiating off of her work partner. “Especially after hearing so much about you!”

Warning bells went off in Natasha’s head. With her history, it was hard to hear those words and not take it as a threat.

“Really?” she said carefully. “How… interesting. From where, exactly?”

“From your files,” Fitz jumped in, before Simmons could answer. “Of course.” He elbowed her not-at-all subtly in the ribs. “Right?”

“… From your _files!_ ” Simmons agreed, her smile becoming slightly glassy. “From your files, and from absolutely no other source whatsoever!”

“If we could,” Loki said, with glacial contempt, “get to the _point_?”

Fitz glowered at him. So did Clint, who was leaning against the doorway. Behind him, Natasha could see the bulky figures of the Special-Ops team as they loitered awkwardly in the background.

Loki waved his hand at the stairwell. “This is a loop, not a bridge or a doorway. If your precious Jane Foster had stepped into it she’d still be in there, bouncing back and forth - which, while entertaining, is hardly a problem you would need my help to solve.”

"He has a point," Simmons admitted. "I mean, there isn't really anywhere to go _to,_ with this. Not at the moment, anyways."

They all watched the shoe as it fell past the landing again.

 _“Dah dah-dah daaaaah!”_ jangled one of the machines. Natasha couldn’t make out which one it was.

“The Convergence has brought all of the Realms into sync," Loki said. He moved closer to the railing. Natasha tensed, but he only leaned forwards and peered upwards, where a section of the ceiling had fallen away, exposing the sky. "As they move closer they’re all reaching out, sending out little tendrils and roots, trying to grab a hold of something to grow on.” 

“Undirected phase-space synchronicity, of course,” Fitz muttered, as though any of those words made sense when said in conjunction. “And it would create a weak point in space and time– if someone wanted to create a Foster Bridge, this would be the perfect place to do it.”

“But there would be no way of predicting where the other end of the bridge would form!” Simmons protested. “It would be completely random, you would just end up in whichever point in phase-space was closest!”

“It would involve enormous risk,” Loki agreed. “Fortunately…” His lips moved as he made a show of counting on his fingers, “a whole _five_ out of the Nine Realms can support human life, so there is every chance that Dr. Foster wasn’t immediately incinerated or frozen to death the second she stepped across the bridge. Quite good odds, when you think about it.”

Natasha peered down at the bottom of the stairwell. The ground was littered with empty bottles, candy bar wrappers, and all the other detritus common to abandoned buildings.

“If we open a portal, like Dr. Foster did,” she said, “what are the odds that it will open in the same place that it did for her?”

Loki shrugged. “Less dire than you might think,” he admitted. “Once a connection has been made, it’s often easier to make it a second time.”

“We need to make a Foster Bridge, then.”

“We can’t,” Simmons said. “I mean, we’re _trying_ , but – if the Convergence is going to end in a few days, I’m not sure that we have _time_. I’m sorry,” she added, seeing the look on Thor’s face.

“Dr. Foster managed it,” Natasha pointed out. “Can’t you copy her work?”

“I mean, _yes_ , if we had her notes, or her equipment, or something, but we haven’t found any of it. There was just a load of old rubbish here when we arrived.”

Steve massaged his forehead. “SHIELD really doesn’t have anything that can help us? What about the, the thing, in New Mexico? That opened a bridge, didn’t it?”

And Loki had been the one to come across it.

“It's still buried under several thousand tons of rock, unfortunately," she told him.

“I do hope you’re not waiting for me to _apologize_ ,” Loki murmured. She ignored him.

“Dr. Foster must have left _something_ ,” Stark insisted. He stood up and tried to dust himself off, leaving white hand prints on his black under suit. “There must be blueprints – something in her published papers - a note scribbled on a napkin – files saved to the Cloud – I don’t know, maybe an Instagram photo, or something that could give us a clue!” He brandished his screwdriver at Natasha. “And you can’t tell me that, if there _is_ , SHIELD wouldn’t have found it by now. They’re holding out on us.”

“Or someone else is holding out on _them_ ,” she corrected.

Over by the doorway, Clint coughed.

“I think,” he said, reluctantly, “I might know who that ‘someone’ is…”

//


	18. Chapter 18

Darcy Lewis, Political Science major and sometimes intern of astrophysics, sat back in the chair SHIELD had provided for her comfort and convenience and crossed her arms.

“Nuh uh.”

“Please, Ms. Lewis.” Agent Sitwell clasped his hands together against the edge of the table between them and leaned forwards. “Everything we’ve done has been to protect you and Dr. Foster.”

His posture was intended to project an earnest truthfulness, but Darcy was having none of it. “Yeah, because having your jack-booted thugs confiscate all our research in New Mexico -.”

“Our agents do not wear jack-boots, Ms. Lewis. This use of fascist imagery does not help to foster civil discussion.”

“- not to mention the fact that I called the London Metropolitan Police and you guys showed up instead, really makes me feel _protected_ , you know?” She cast a jaded eye around the small grey room she had been escorted to on board the Globemaster. “Love the soundproofing in here, it really fills me with confidence in our shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence organizations that operate outside the bounds of constitutional law.”

Sitwell leaned back and removed his glasses. “I’m not sure you understand the severity of your position, Ms. Lewis,” he said. “We have reason to believe that you are concealing evidence relevant to a missing person’s investigation. That’s very serious.”

Darcy cast a speculative look up at the ceiling. “Okay. So maybe I did move some stuff around before I called the police. And maybe that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, considering that it’s Dr. Foster’s _personal property_ and I thought I’d better keep it safe in case a certain shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence organization showed up and stole it, like they did the _last_ time we met them.”

“SHIELD acted for the best. Dr. Foster was involving herself with forces she didn’t understand and couldn’t control. She was putting the safety of everyone on Earth at risk for the sake of an unproven hypothesis -.”

“Bullshit!” Darcy slammed her hand down on the table and pointed accusingly at him. “SHIELD doesn’t get to talk about ‘safety’ and ‘risk’ when it’s your fault that we had _actual aliens_ pouring out of the sky over New York!”

“SHIELD is an U.N.-chartered organization with the backing of law-enforcement organizations world-wide -.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure you keep them all _really_ well-informed about the questionable shit you guys get up to. That doesn’t give you the right to tell Jane that she can’t investigate astral phenomena while all along you guys are dicking around with _Nazi weapons_ and opening portals to freaky other dimensions!”

Something flickered in Sitwell’s eyes. “You’ve spoken with Dr. Selvig.” It was a statement, not a question, and for the first time Darcy looked uncomfortable. “He’s a very ill man, Ms. Lewis.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“He’s overworked himself,” Sitwell insisted, keeping his voice level. “He needs rest, not the atmosphere of over-excitement that you and Dr. Foster seem to generate wherever you go.”

“He needs to be kept away from SHIELD’s crazy-ass schemes, is what he needs!”

“Dr. Selvig checked himself into a mental health facility in London,” Sitwell said, apparently thinking aloud. “I wonder if that has anything to do with why you and Dr. Foster are here?”

Darcy looked away and began to kick at the leg of the table.

Agent Sitwell sighed. “Ms. Lewis, your friend and supervisor has apparently disappeared through a hole in the fabric of space.” He laced his fingers together over the top of the table. “Aren’t you even a little bit concerned?”

“Jane’s a smart cookie. She’ll be fine,” Darcy said, not meeting his eyes. “With her luck she’ll probably turn up towing an entire beach volleyball team of hot buff dudes with her. I should be jealous. We should _all_ be jealous.”

Sitwell took his hands off the table and leaned back. He eyed her doubtfully, and Darcy began kicking the table again. Its aluminum surface shuddered visibly every time her Vans struck, making a noise that sounded a little bit like thunder.

“Look,” Sitwell said, deciding to try a different tack, “if this is about your i-Pod, I’ve _said_ we’re sorry for not returning it and I’ve got people looking for it right now -.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Please. i-Pods are _so_ 2011\. But if I don’t get my phone back at the end of this, I will be _very_ pissed.”

Sitwell buried his face in his hands.

“I’ve got, like, a hundred apps on that thing!”

There was a knock on the door. Darcy watched out of the corner of her eye as Sitwell got up and answered it. He spoke in an undertone to someone in the corridor outside, and then turned back to her.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Something’s come up. I’ll just be a moment.”

The door swung shut behind him, and the expression of bored, too-cool-for-this indifference dropped off Darcy’s face. She sat up straight in her chair, her teeth worrying her bottom lip.

Pushing back her chair, she headed over to the door. It was locked. That was what she had expected, but only the stupid or the terminally naive stayed put in an honest-to-god interrogation room without trying the doorknob. Time for Plan B.

Her hands flew to her hair, her fingers trembling only slightly as she pulled out a bobby pin. That was what people did in these kinds of situations, right? You took a bobby pin, stuck it in the lock, jiggled it around a bit, and –

There was no keyhole on the inside of the door. Darcy’s shoulders sagged.

The table, as she found out when she tried to drag it over to use as a barricade, was bolted to the floor. That left the chair. It was aluminum, and light enough that she could lift it over her head without much effort. Not the best defensive weapon, but it was all she had.

She propped the second chair against the door, balancing it on two legs so that it would fall over when the door was opened. She took up her position on the other side of it with her chair in her hands.

“Door opens, they trip over the chair, I hit them with _this_ chair, and run away,” she muttered to herself, trying to stay tense, but also limber, so that she would be ready to jump over the (hopefully unconscious) SHIELD agent and escape. Maybe she should do some stretches. She didn’t want to get a cramp while sprinting away from a shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence organization that operated outside the bounds of constitutional law. “Door opens, trip over chair, hit them with chair, run away. Okay. Door -.”

The door opened.

The chair fell over. The person who had opened the door stooped to pick it up, and Darcy’s chair went whistling over their head, missing by a hairsbreadth. The momentum of it spun her around, and she let out a small scream as _whoever_ it was grabbed her from behind and pulled the chair out of her hands.

They let go. Darcy spun back around, screamed _again_ , this time in a good way, and launched herself at –

“ _Thor_!” She tried to hug him. Her arms didn’t even reach all the way around his torso. “Oh my _god_ , you would not _believe_ how good it is to see you! How did you even get in here? No, never mind – come on, we’ve got to get out of here, and I can tell you about Jane -.”

She grabbed him by the arm and tried to tug him out the door – but he remained immobile.

“Darcy.” He looked happy to see her – he was smiling, or kind of smiling, but he also looked really serious. That was fine. Jane was missing. It was very serious, but he could be serious about it _afterwards_ , when they weren’t still in the clutches of a shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence yadda yadda yadda. “It is good to see you, too. There is much we must discuss. But first, I must explain.”

He took a deep breath. “I am here to speak to you on behalf of SHIELD.”

Darcy dropped his arm. “Aw,” she said, “ _poop_.”

//


	19. Chapter 19

“But,” Darcy said, waving her spoon in the air, “I don’t get it! _You_ saw what they were like in New Mexico! You can’t trust these guys, Thor. Believe me. Half the required readings in high school English were about how much the surveillance state sucks. The other half were about the inadvisability of faking your own death as a way of getting out of a marriage to someone you don’t like,” she added, “but that’s not so relevant right now.”

She jammed the spoon back into her tub of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. Since Thor had shown up, SHIELD had changed their tactics from menacing her with arrest to bribery, and she was taking full advantage. Withstanding threats from shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence agencies that operated outside the bounds of constitutional law was enough to make anyone feel hungry.

And, worst case scenario, she’d hang onto the spoon and use it to dig her way out of whatever prison they threw her into without due process.

Thor looked down at his own spoon. He looked unhappy, even though she had _said_ she would share.

“Sometimes it is necessary to work with those whom – because of how they have treated you in the past – you do not trust,” he said. “SHIELD has knowledge and resources that we will need, and I believe that this time they will help and not hinder us.”

“Why do we have to get involved with them at all?” She scooped out another spoonful of ice cream. Thor had hardly eaten any. She had a lot of work to do if she wanted to see the bottom of this tub. “They were totally useless in New Mexico. C’mon.” She jostled him with her elbow. “We don’t need them. We’ll bust Erik out of the hospital, and find Jane ourselves. ‘Badges?’ ” She did her best sneer. “ ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!’ ”

This pitch-perfect impression was lost on Thor, which she maybe should have foreseen. His brow wrinkled. “Erik is in the hospital?”

“Uh, yeah?” She tapped her temple with her spoon. “He was _possessed_ , remember? He checked himself into a mental hospital – and that was only _after_ he got arrested for indecent exposure at Stonehenge, and can I just say, unexpectedly seeing my boss’s advisor’s naked ass is right at the top of my list of reasons for never watching cable news ever again -.” She stopped, because Thor’s shoulders had gone all hunched, like he was trying to make himself smaller. He was fighting a losing battle on that front, but still. “… Thor? Big guy?”

“This is my fault,” he said quietly. His fingers were leaving imprints on the soft metal of the spoon. “I have brought this on you – on you, and on Erik, and now _Jane_ -.”

“Oh, no. Nonono, hey, you can’t say that!” She put her arm around as much of his shoulders as she could reach. “You don’t know, maybe Erik would have been streaking around ancient monuments _anyways_ , I haven't read his profile on Rate My Professor, maybe he’s always been an exhibitionist! And Jane…” She sighed. “Take my word for it, disappearing through a weird-ass rip in the space-time continuum is just so, so Jane. You can’t blame yourself for that. Anyways, you're here to help now. That counts for a lot."

Thor still looked sad, but he was smiling, which she counted as a win. “Perhaps you are right.”

“Darn tootin’ I am.”

Darcy looked down at the tub of ice cream between them. Even in the air-conditioned interrogation room it was melting gently into a thick slurry of cherry pieces and purple food colouring.

Maybe she was overreacting. SHIELD could be a great asset to have on their side, as much as she hated to admit it. She talked a big game, but the truth was, she _wasn’t_ sure that they could find Jane on their own. Her major was in Poli Sci, for fuck’s sake, not in weird-ass portals. It would be different if Jane was there. Jane could do anything: she had proved the existence of theoretical wormholes and she had a whole _theory_ named after her, and she had opened a _doorway to another dimension_ , and, god, that had come with the kind of high that Darcy was willing to spend the rest of her life chasing –

But that was Jane. And Jane was gone.

On the other hand… no matter how hard she tried, Darcy couldn’t forget New Mexico. How SHIELD had just rolled up in their unmarked vans, and had driven away with a lifetime’s-worth of data. They had even taken the posters off the walls. They had taken her _goddam i-Pod_ , and the memory was making her hands shake even now, because it was such a stupid, petty thing to do – what, did they think she had files saved on it? That secret messages were hidden in the song order? – but they had done it, and _she hadn’t been able to stop them_.

Of course she had read about that kind of thing happening before, and had talked about it in her classes, but it was something that happened to other people, in other countries. She had assumed, naively and from her position of relative privilege as a white American citizen, that it would never happen _here_.

Boy howdy, had she ever been wrong.

“I understand,” Thor said quietly next to her. "You cannot imagine working alongside SHIELD. You have been betrayed by them, and if you trust them now, then you think that you will have only yourself to blame when they inevitably betray you again." He took a deep breath. “Perhaps you are right, and they will. But these are desperate times, and they require all of us to take risks and make compromises. All I can say to you is this: you have my word that I will stand with you against them, and that I will do everything in my power to protect you from the consequences of this alliance, now and in the future – just as I hope that I may count on your protection in turn.”

It sounded ridiculous. When was Thor ever going to need her help with anything? His biceps were bigger than her entire head! But he looked so completely serious as he said it that Darcy couldn't help but take him seriously. 

She sighed and put her spoon down, giving up on the tub of semi-liquid ice cream (for now).

“Alright,” she said. “You win. I’ll help."

She squeaked as she was swept up into an enormous bear hug. Because she had a reputation to maintain, she added: “But only because you smell so good.”

Thor chuckled, which was _incredibly distracting_ when her face was smushed up against his abs – but then he stopped, and it did not escape Darcy's notice that he sounded guilty as fuck as he said:

“There is _one_ other thing I should mention…”

//

 


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... I feel like I should maybe tag for a thing that happens in this chapter, but I'm not sure how. 'Unethical animal testing'? 'Loki that is not how you hold a cat'? Maybe just 'Don't worry about the cat, the cat is going to be fine!'? 
> 
> So, yeah. Don't worry about the cat! The cat is going to be fine...

The first thing Darcy Lewis said when she saw Loki was: “I thought you’d be taller.”

Loki looked down at her in consternation. “I can’t say I’ve ever thought about you at all,” he admitted frankly. “ _Who_ are _you_?”

Darcy gave a haughty sniff and walked away with her nose in the air as she picked her way through the tangle of electrical cords that littered the landing.

“Just so we’re clear,” she called over her shoulder, grabbing a coiled extension cord and heaving it out of the way, “I’m only doing this for Thor. I’ve still got a bone to pick with you guys and your – uff! – creepy surveillance operations. And get this crap out of the way, I need room to work.”

“Are you sure this is a priority?” Agent Sitwell said, in the especially polite tone of voice that meant ‘I don’t think this is a priority.’ “We need to retrieve Jane’s equipment from wherever you’ve taken it. I’ve got a squad ready -.”

“Don’t need ‘em.” She straightened up from where she had been rummaging around in one of the piles of junk that had been shoved out of the way to make room for SHIELD’s equipment. “I didn’t take it anywhere. It’s all still here.”

She held up two pieces of twisted metal and shoved them together. They fit together with a _click_. A blue light on one of them started to blink.

“… You’re kidding me,” Sitwell said flatly.

“Hey, just because something isn’t monogrammed with your freaky little logo doesn’t mean it can’t do the job it’s supposed to do. You saw what we had to work with in New Mexico.” She kicked aside one of the black hard-shelled cases that SHIELD used to transport their equipment. “So, I hear we’re on a deadline, right?”

“That’s right. The Convergence, as it’s called, ends a few days from now -.” He flinched as Darcy clapped her hands in front of his face and bellowed:

“So let’s show some _hustle_ , people! Hands off Glocks and on with socks! And someone get me a whistle for when I’m tired of shouting!”

//

SHIELD hustled.

Under Darcy Lewis’s directions, the landing was transformed. Every object with a SHIELD logo on it was taken away, and the litter that had previously been shoved to the margins was reassembled and set up around the stairwell.

For the time being, the Avengers found themselves surplus to requirements. They loitered awkwardly around the landing, watching as Darcy bullied and harangued the SHIELD junior agents into bringing her things, taking things away, and, in one case, dropping and giving her thirty push-ups.

She had a natural gift for management, Natasha reflected. It was a shame that she took such a negative view of SHIELD. With proper training, Darcy could have become a great handler.

Take the case of Tony Stark, for example. He had, at first, shown a tendency towards following Darcy around and offering a running commentary on what she was doing and what she should have been doing instead: but before he could go too far she had handed him a spare piece of equipment and a mini screwdriver, and since then he had been sitting off in a corner, completely absorbed in tinkering, and being no trouble to anyone.

Steve, meanwhile, was sound asleep standing up, with his arms crossed over his chest and his shield propped up against his feet. Clint had been banished to an observation post outside, after he had made them all uncomfortable by glowering ceaselessly at Loki, who pretended not to notice. Thor was watching Darcy, and Loki was watching Thor.

Natasha was watching Loki.

Seeing him come through the Bifrost had been a shock. After the scene in the throne room, all of her earlier optimism that he could be persuaded to cooperate had vanished. Clint was right, she decided. His bitterness ran too deep. They would never have been able to trust him; and the knowledge that he was once again behind bars came as a relief. Once she was back on Midgard, surrounded by familiar people and places, it had been easy to convince herself that what had happened on Asgard was an aberration. It had been a temporary lapse in judgement, one that could be passed over in discreet silence. No one knew about her conversation with the All-Father; no one knew how close she had come to making a terrible, perhaps even deadly, mistake.

(Clint suspected. But he didn’t _know_.)

And then the Bifrost had opened up...

She should have known better. Odin and Loki weren't the only players in this game. And it was galling to think that _the Black Widow_ had underestimated the effectiveness of a woman's influence.

The enchanted chain of Gleipnir glinted dull silver around Loki's neck. He had a habit of touching it when he thought he was unobserved.

He was a very bad judge of when he was and was not being observed.

The silence, and the waiting, appeared to be grating on him. He let his hand drop.

“Come now,” he said to Thor. “You can’t plan on ignoring me the entire time we’re on Midgard. That’s hardly the way to treat _family_.”

Thor stared straight ahead. He gave no sign that he had heard. Loki shrugged.

“Oh, well, if that’s how you feel… Perhaps you would prefer the company of one of your new companions, given that you seem to like them so much?” His voice altered and he said, in a pitch-perfect impression of Steve’s voice: “Hey, wanna have a rousing discussion about truth, honor, and patriotism? God bless America!”

On the other side of the landing, Steve twitched and wrinkled his nose, like a sleeping dog who’d had the inside of its ear tickled, but Thor remained stone-faced.

“I hope your tricks are amusing to you,” he said. “They are not so to me.”

He turned towards Loki so that, for the first time that Natasha had seen, the two of them were face-to-face.

“You should know,” Thor said, lowering his voice, “that when we fought in the past, I did so with the hope that my brother was still in there, somewhere.” He spoke quietly, but not so quietly that Natasha couldn’t hear him as he said: “That hope no longer exists. If you betray me, I _will_ kill you.”

The two one-time brothers locked eyes. Natasha saw Loki’s smile falter, and then slip from his face.

It was, she judged, fortunate for everyone present that this touching family scene was interrupted by Darcy Lewis, who stepped forwards holding one end of an electrical cord in each hand.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and others,” she announced, “I give you - _the Foster Bridge_.”

She plugged the cords together. Nothing happened.

“Is that it?” Stark said. “You might have blown a fuse, I’ll go check -.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “What kind of smoke-and-lights show were you expecting?" she demanded. "You can’t _see_ the bridge, you have to use the _phase-meter_.” She flourished a hand-held instrument that looked a bit like a graphing calculator.

The Avengers crowded around to watch as she aimed it at the portal. The screen showed a picture of a globe, turning around and around.

“That’s the hold screen,” she explained. “It’s still calibrating. Wait for it…”

They waited. The globe kept spinning.

Darcy banged the side of the phase-meter on the railing a couple of times and held it out again. This time the screen flickered, and changed to an image of a spiky line that flickered and jumped in time to some unknown signal.

“There!” she cried triumphantly. “That means the bridge is open!”

“That’s amazing,” Steve said. “What does the line mean?”

“Man, _I_ don’t know. All I know is, you point the phase-meter like _this_ , and press the button like _that_ , and if the screen looks like _this_ then you go and drag Jane away from her lunch date with some dude her mom set her up with and make her come look at it.”

“Wait, what?” said Thor.

The Avengers all looked from the phase-meter to the stairwell. It was Steve, in his role as their fearless leader, who voiced the question that was on all of their minds.

“So,” he said. “What’s our next step?”

"Well," Darcy said, " _Jane_ went careening in there blind without any idea of what was on the other side, and she didn't come back. So I would suggest _not_ doing that. But, you know, it's a free world and all. Do whatever you want, I won't stop you."

“I could modify an Iron Man suit into something that can operate independently," Stark suggested. “One of the older models, it shouldn't take long -.”

“I don’t know why you’d waste your time with toys when there are much simpler ways of investigating this,” Loki stated from the outskirts of their group. He snapped his fingers. “Bring me a cat. There should be lots of them living in a building like this.”

Stark looked suspicious. “A cat? What do you want a cat for?”

“Cats are mystic creatures,” Loki said loftily. “Even on Midgard they are associated with witchcraft and sorcery, are they not? They often have a sixth sense about these kinds of things. I want to see its reaction to the portal.”

Natasha met the eyes of the SHIELD Special-Ops agents by the door and raised an eyebrow. They didn’t look happy about it, but a couple of them split off from the main group and went in different directions to look for cats.

Eventually there was a shout from one of the lower floors and the sounds of a scuffle. One of the agents came back carrying a scrawny black stray by the scruff of its neck. Its right paw was tipped with white, as though it had stepped in a puddle of milk.

“Ah!” Loki said when he saw it. “Perfect…”

The cat’s eyes bulged with terror as he took it into his arms, but it settled willingly enough against his chest as he began scratching it in circles behind its ears. Loki wandered closer to the stairwell, murmuring to it in a low voice. Slowly, the cat’s eyes began to close. It began to purr, throatily, like the puttering of a rusty lawn mower engine.

“Don’t tell me you can _talk_ to that flea bag, Disney Princess,” Stark scoffed.

“It isn’t necessary to talk to it,” Loki murmured, still stroking the cat. “It is merely necessary to do – _this_.”

And without ceremony, he lifted up the cat and dropped it into the portal.

Darcy yelped. She dove for the electrical cord, and ripped it apart. They heard the edge of a startled meow as the cat disappeared – and then it reappeared at the top of the stairwell and fell past the landing again.

Natasha sighed. “You were bullshitting us about the mystical stuff, weren’t you?” she said.

Loki flashed her a grin. “Of course. If I had told you _that_ was what I wanted to do with it, you never would have let me have the animal in the first place.”

A dopplering yowl and its abrupt end marked the reappearance and re-disappearance of the cat.

“You _asshole_!” Darcy yelled. “That’s _cruelty to animals!_ ”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry? Would you rather I had thrown you in there instead?”

The cat went hurtling by once more, still meowing. It seemed to be accelerating.

“I don’t care, animal testing is _unethical_! _Get it out of there!_ ”

“Excuse me for thinking than an animal whose tiny, miserable life consisted of chasing cockroaches around an abandoned building was expendable,” Loki grumbled. “But, if you insist on being sentimental…”

Above them, the cat flashed into existence once more. As it went rocketing past their floor, eyes bulging and claws extended, Loki’s hand shot out. In one quick motion, he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and flipped it into Thor’s arms.

The cat went off like a small, furry, urinating firework.

It clawed its way up the front of Thor’s chest, hissing and spitting like a possessed teakettle. Taken by surprise, Thor’s instinctive reaction was to bat it away before it could reach his face, and the cat went flying through the air, straight at Steve, who caught it on his shield.

The cat landed on the vibranium surface with its claws extended and _scraaaped_ down the front of it with a noise like fingernails on a chalkboard before dropping off onto the floor and taking off running. Everyone scrambled aside as it went darting between their legs - everyone, that is, except for Stark, who was standing directly in its path. His eyes went wide.

“Oh, no you don’t!” he said adamantly. His fingers stabbed frantically at his Iron Man cuffs. “Stay away from me, you flea-ridden little – _Fuck_!”

All around him on the landing, the pieces of the Iron Man armour lifted up off the ground and began to orbit his body. In such close quarters, however, its usual precision was lacking. Stark staggered as a shin pad almost took him out at the knees.

“FUCK!" he yelled. He was knocked backwards as the chest plate slammed into his body. "Fuck FUCK THAT PINCHES, not the face not the face notthe -” His final burst profanity was converted into a stream of static as the faceplate snapped down over his head.

One of the Special-Ops agents screamed as the cat scrambled up his chest like he was a tree. Amid all the chaos, Natasha was the only one who saw Loki bend down and plug the two ends of the electrical cord together.

On the ground, laying where Darcy had dropped it, the screen on the phase-meter switched from the spinning globe to the spiky graph.

“ _Don’t even think about it!_ ” Natasha yelled.

His expression, as he looked back over his shoulder at her, was unbearably condescending.

“Oh, come now, Agent Romanova,” he demurred. “You can’t tell me you weren’t expecting _something_ like this to happen.”

And with that, he vaulted over the railing - and disappeared.

He didn't reappear

“HOLD STILL!” a SHIELD agent yelled, fumbling to unbuckle his sidearm as his co-worker wrestled with the panicking cat. There was a strong scent of ammonia in the air, and Natasha came to the decision that _literally anywhere else in the universe_ was a better place to be than this landing at this point in time.

She caught Darcy’s eye. “Loki’s gone through the portal!” she yelled. “I’m going after him!”

“Wait!” Before she could jump, Darcy grabbed the phase-meter from off the floor and tossed it to her. “So you can find the other end of the portal!” she explained.

Surprised, Natasha looked from her to the phase-meter and back. “That's... smart. Thanks.”

Darcy flashed her a thumbs-up. “Go get ‘im, tiger.”

Natasha hopped up onto the railing. She hesitated for only the barest instance, looking down at the trash-strewn bottom of the stairwell.

And she jumped.

//


	21. Chapter 21

Thanks to what could charitably be called a misspent youth, Natasha was familiar with the smell of burning bone.

This world _stank_ of it.

It was the first thing she became aware of as she came through the other side of the portal, followed immediately by the feeling of dry, hot air against her skin.

She hit the ground, rolled, and came up with her gun held in front of her, ready to fire.

There was no one there. There was no sign of Loki that she could see, and no evidence of any other living creature nearby. Cautiously, Natasha got to her feet and looked around.

She was in a cave. It was dark, but she could see the mouth of it up ahead, white and dazzling with light. Clasping her gun close to her chest, she moved carefully towards the entrance.

The landscape outside the cave was monotonous in the extreme. It stretched out for as far as she could see in a wide expanse of black sand, piled up into dunes and whipped into curious patterns by the wind. The sky had a perpetually overcast look to it, and the wind whistling through the sand produced a faint susurrus that might have sounded like an insect, if she had thought there was anything living in this place at all.

She thought uneasily of radiation levels, and dead zones, and felt her skin prickle.

There was _one_ sign of life. A line of footprints led off across the sand. Natasha bit her lip.

The logical next step, now that she knew Loki had escaped, was to turn around, head back through the portal, find Director Fury, and hand in her resignation, because _she should have seen this coming_. It was _Loki_. He was what Maria Hill would call a 'shit-disturber'. He provoked, he pushed buttons, he tested limits. It was his _thing,_ just like Bruce’s thing was running away.

She was oh-for-two on this mission. If she had still been with Department X, she would have been due for reprogramming by now.

A gust of wind caught the sand and threw it into her face, making her cough. Out past the dunes the horizon was blurred, blending the land and sky seamlessly together. Natasha recognize a sandstorm when she saw one.

Part of her really was tempted to turn around and go: to leave Loki to whatever schemes and plots he was making, here in this land that stank of a very particular kind of death, and good riddance. He was more trouble than he was worth.

But.

He was her responsibility. She had all but given her word to the All-Father that she would be accountable for him. It was her judgement that had led to him being released, it was her pride and reputation that were on the line. More than that - he was _her_ agent.

She cast one last look back over her shoulder at the mouth of the cave. She knew Director Fury. There would be no rescue party, not yet, not with so many unknowns. And, as with any search, the longer she delayed, the less chance there was of success. The wind was already blurring the footprints in the sand, like a thumb dragged over wet ink.

Natasha double-checked her ammunition, and began to walk.

//

Following the footprints meant moving out and away from cover. The landscape was studded with rocks, some of them quite large, but between them there were wide, empty stretches of sand where she had to move quickly, keeping as low to the ground as possible, like a spider crossing a kitchen floor at night. Some of the rocks had corners to them. Others had smooth, flat sides. Natasha made a map of them in her mind, marking down the distinctive features of each and positioning them relative to the mouth of the cave.

The footsteps marched off in a straight line. Each of them was evenly spaced, except for one unusual mark in the side of a dune. Natasha studied it from all angles, and sunk her fingers knuckle-deep in the warm sand, before concluding that Loki must have slipped and fallen onto one knee.

She wouldn’t go far, she told herself. She had no water, no head-covering, and no GPS to help her find the cave again. Even the position of the sun above her couldn’t be trusted. She had a compass, but the needle in it only spun in slow, unsettling circles.

She would go to the top of the next ridge, she decided, and no farther.

The ground sloped upwards beneath her feet. It ended abruptly as the ridge dropped off, making a clean line between the ground and the sky. Natasha crawled the final few meters on her belly, so as not to become silhouetted against the horizon.

Slowly, very slowly, she raised herself up on her elbows and peered over the top of the ridge.

There were _people_ down there.

Her heart hammered inside her chest as she held her position, until her arms trembled from the exertion, but no one pointed at her, or looked up at the ridge and gave a shout of surprise. After counting to one hundred, with no sign that she had been seen, she let herself exhale.

There was a pair of microbinoculars in her pouches. She extracted them and brought them up to her eyes, grateful for the anti-reflective coating that would prevent her from being given away by a flash of light off the lenses.

The valley didn't just hold people: there was also a spaceship in it. It was sleek and gunmetal grey, and it stood balanced like a knife in the sand. Without any landmarks to compare it to it was difficult to judge its scale, but if the grey-and-black figures moving around it were anything close to human-size, then it was massive.

And the figures certainly _looked_ human. They had the right number of arms and legs at least, and the masks they were wearing had only two eyeholes. They came marching out of the spaceship two by two, each of them identical to their neighbour, and formed up into columns. Every one of them was carrying what looked like a spear.

Natasha’s heart sank. She recognized a military drill when she saw one. These were _soldiers_. Whatever this realm was, it didn't appear to be a peaceful one.

There was something else, too. She refocused the microbinoculars and steadied her breathing to take the tremor out of her hands. There, at the base of the spaceship. A ring of soldiers surrounded it, facing outwards. It looked like a dark rectangle, set upright in the sand. Its edges glowed with a red light.

Natasha frowned and lowered the microbinoculars. Pulling the phase-meter out of her belt, she held it out as far as she dared, not wanting to risk dropping it down the side of the ridge. The globe on its screen turned around and around. Maybe her hunch was wrong.

She was just about to put it away when the screen flickered and changed. Natasha stared. “It’s a _portal_?”

For an instant, she thought that it was the wind that made the sharp, drawn-in-sound that followed, like an intake of breath. But then:

“Curious, isn’t it?” said Loki. His voice came from the empty air. “Why don’t you take a closer look?”

Natasha’s eyes went wide.

She threw herself to one side in a barrel roll, and came up on one knee ready to drive her elbow into his crotch – but he wasn’t there, there was _nothing_ there.

A hand grabbed her by the hair, and yanked her head back. She held herself still, rolling her eyes as she tried to see behind her.

“Did you really think it was going to be that easy?” His breath hissed somewhere behind her, but she still couldn't see him. She shut her eyes. “That I would be _happy_ following your orders, and obeying your commands? No.” The grip on her hair tightened. “You’ve underestimated me for the last time, Natalia Alianov - _aagh_!”

She jerked her head back, at the same time bringing her clenched fists smashing down onto where she judged his elbow must be. She felt his arm buckle and she twisted around and kicked him, hard.

If she kept her eyes closed, rather than on the empty space where he _should_ have been, then it was almost a normal fight. She grabbed for where she thought his throat would be, and felt the smooth metal of Glepnir under her hand. Hooking her fingers into it, she yanked his head forwards and slammed her forehead into his face, hoping like hell that he found it at least as painful as she did.

The neck was her best bet, going by what she could remember. The rest of him was covered with cloth and leather and buckles, but if she could hit him in the side of the neck with her Widow’s Bite, then there was a chance - a small chance - that she could take him.

She drew back her arm to hit him, still holding onto Glepnir with her other hand - and the sand shifted under her feet.

The ridge collapsed. Natasha fought to keep her footing, but it was a losing battle. The sand began to fall, pulling her with it as it slid down the side of the dune into the valley. Her arm was almost jerked out of its socket as Loki redoubled his efforts to pull himself free.

"Let go!" There was an edge of panic to his voice. " _Let go_ you idiot, or we're _both_ going to -!"

The whole world crumbled away into sand. The next thing Natasha knew, she was falling. _  
_

//


	22. Chapter 22

It was Director Fury himself who climbed the ladder to Clint's observation post to tell him what had happened, which was a shame. At any other time the sight of the director of SHIELD clinging grimly to the handrails while a brisk wind whipped at his black leather jacket would have made Clint's heart grow three sizes, but as he was currently unable to feel anything other than overwhelming anxiety and fear, the experience was wasted on him.

“Who’s on the recovery team?” he demanded. He was not panicking, he told himself. He was expressing _reasonable concern_. “Is it – you didn’t send Johnson, did you? She _hates_ Johnson. Or – shit, are you waiting for me? I’m ready to go, sir, just… let… me…”

He trailed off in the face of Director Fury’s unwavering stare. Clint wasn’t _great_ at reading the director’s body language, since even at the best of times he rarely deviated from what could be called a 'Menacing Aura of Competence', but he was getting some definite vibes from him right now.

They were not good vibes.

“You didn’t contact me over the comms,” Clint said slowly. “It’s the fastest way to get in touch, so _why_ wouldn’t you use the comms, unless -.”

“There is no recovery team, Agent Barton,” Director Fury said, and the fact that he had seen it coming didn't lessen the sting of it at all. “We are in standby mode until and unless we receive communication from Agent Romanov requesting us to take action.”

“ _Bullshit_! Sir, I’ll go alone, that’s reasonable, you can’t -.”

“Can’t I?” Fury raised one eyebrow. “One of my best agents just disappeared into the ass end of nowhere and we have no idea what might have happened to her. No one else is going through that portal until we know _for sure_ what’s on the other side. But look on the bright side,” he added, not looking in the least like someone who was looking on the bright side. “We’ve left the portal open.”

Clint stared at him until the penny dropped. “You wouldn’t -.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response. You know the answer, and Agent Romanov does too. And if whatever comes through that portal next doesn’t at least _look_ like her?" He smiled grimly. "I’m shutting that shit _down_. No matter what side of the portal she happens to be on at the time.”

//

“That… did not go the way I anticipated," Loki admitted.

Natasha rolled her eyes so hard they almost rolled out of her _goddamn head_.

It had been too much to hope that the collapse of the ridge and their precipitous descent would pass unnoticed. A detachment of the grey-and-black soldiers was already jogging across the valley floor towards them even before the sand had stopped sliding, leaving them both buried up to their waists. The soldiers had been obliged to dig them out before they could be detained properly.

Now the two of them were on their knees with their hands behind their heads, surrounded by a ring of soldiers holding spear-guns. Natasha tried to wriggle her finger under her cuffs to scoop out some of the sand that had worked its way into her uniform. Her entire body felt as though it was coated in silica.

“I wouldn’t let her do that, if I were you,” Loki said suddenly. "She's a legend, on her world. A nightmare."

The soldiers guarding them became visibly more alert. One of them made a gesture as if to prod Natasha with their spear. She stopped and carefully put her hands back where they could see them, glaring daggers at Loki.

"If _I_ were you, I wouldn't believe a word he says," she shot back. "He's the _god of lies_."

“Save your breath, Natalia Alianovna," Loki said. He sounded inappropriately cheerful for a man who was surrounded by people pointing weapons at him. “They can’t understand you without the All-Speak. One of the privileges of royalty!”

Great. So she was surrounded by a potentially hostile force, and her only means of communicating with them was through the very person who had just tried to throw her off a cliff. It was not a very promising situation.

At least Loki was inside the ring of soldiers with her. Whatever the spell was that had been hiding him, it had been broken by the time he hit the ground - not that it should have even been possible in the first place, not with Gleipnir still wrapped around his neck. And yet he had gotten around it, somehow.

Natasha had so many questions, and she couldn’t think of a single person who could be relied on to give her a straight answer to any of them.

She eyed the soldier standing nearest to her. “ _Por favor… fala portugues?_ ” she asked them. “ _Sprichst du Deutch? Parlez-vous francais?_ ”

The round eyeholes regarded her impassively.

Loki sighed loudly. “I told you, they won’t understand you without the All-Speak. Svartalfheim is the oldest of the Nine Realms, and the Dark Elves speak a language that was invented before your sun was even born. You're wasting your breath.”

“Dark Elves. Svartalfheim,” Natasha repeated. “Thanks, that was what I wanted to know.”

Loki shut his mouth with a snap. He looked furious, and Natasha found that she was enjoying herself for the first time since she’d seen him come through the Bifrost.

The index file of her memory threw up a card. “But they’re supposed to be _dead_!”

“Evidently the rumours of their demise were greatly exaggerated. But patience, Natalia Alianovna,” he added, casting his eyes up at the knife-edge of the spaceship that towered vertiginously over them. “We have company…”

A tiny speck detached itself from the very top of the ship. It moved down the front of it like a zipper, growing larger and larger until it revealed itself to be an elevator, with two people on board. It glided to a stop at the bottom of the ship, and a ramp extended from it.

There was a general shuffling and straightening of spears amongst the soldiers as its passengers descended the ramp and approached them. Evidently these were people of importance.

Loki got to his feet. When he wasn’t immediately stabbed to death, Natasha did too, keeping a wary eye on both him and the soldiers.

“Greetings, Malekith of the Dark Elves!” Loki called out, loudly and self-importantly. “And to you and your most honourable master!”

The two figures stopped at the edge of the circle of soldiers, who moved aside to make room for them. One of them was dressed much as the soldiers around them were, except that he wasn’t wearing a mask. His skin was a purple-grey colour that Natasha had never seen on a living human and his eyes, which flickered from Loki to his companion and back, were completely black, with no whites to them whatsoever.

The other one… Natasha looked away. She was not overly given to squeamishness, but the other figure had an oozy, rotting quality to it, one that she associated with corpses pulled from ponds and rivers. A tattered black hood covered its face, and the voice that slipped out from under it gurgled and hissed like the water in a scummy stream.

“My master has nothing to say to _you_ ,” it told Loki. “He has no truck with failure.”

The emphasis was pointed. Loki flinched.

“And what if I brought him a gift?" he tried. “A warrior, to swell the ranks of his family.”

He gestured towards Natasha.

The hood turned towards her. Natasha felt its mind touch hers, and _something_ insinuated itself into her brain. There was a rotting, alien _thing_ in her thoughts, seeking, questioning, probing -

_whoareyouwhatareyouwhyareyouherewhatareyoumeantforwhatcanyoudo_

\- and a part of her was revolted, paralyzed by the sheer utter horror of it. It was _in her mind_ , she couldn't fight it or shoot it or kill it -

But the greater part of her - the _Black Widow_ part of her - remembered her training.

There was nothing new about those questions. She had been asked them a hundred, a thousand times before: whether it was as she handed a fake I.D. badge to a suspicious security guard or as she sat before a SHIELD interrogator; whether it was when she wore diamonds around her neck or when she was tied to a chair; whether she was a child in an overlarge coat or a grown woman in a stealth catsuit that was uncomfortably full of sand. People always wanted to know what she was. But all they could ever know was what she told them.

 _Nobody,_ she thought, as hard as she could, _I'm nobody,_ and she collapsed onto her knees in the sand.

“Why are you all being so _mean_?” she demanded out loud, pitching her voice in a nasal whine. She burst into tears. “I want to go _home_!”

The hooded figure's interest slipped away from her immediately, and the sudden absence of it was like being saved from drowning. “Your gift is useless,” it told Loki. "She has no heart."

Loki, meanwhile, was staring at her, appalled. “What are you – get up!” he hissed, out of the corner of his mouth. “What is _wrong_ with you?!”

“Fuck you too, asshole!” she hissed back, and then, when the Dark Elf next to the hooded figure seemed to be watching her a little too closely, threw herself into the sand with renewed wailing. “I hate you! You’re so mean! Take me _home_!”

"Enough of this," the hooded figure rasped, bored and impatient. It lifted its arm, and the ragged sleeve of its robe fell away from its scabbed and slimy hand.

Loki opened his mouth to speak, but the words were stifled in his throat as Gleipnir flared silver around his neck. He gave a shout of pain and hit the ground on his knees, gasping and retching. There was a reek of burning flesh.

The figure turned its back on him. “He is muzzled by the All-Father,” it told the Dark Elf. It sounded amused. “You will have no trouble killing him.”

The Dark Elf nodded and gave an order. Around them, the soldiers closed ranks and lifted their spears.

“You’d _kill_ me?” Loki shouted, as the figure began to walk away, back towards the spaceship. His voice was hoarse and raw. “I thought death was supposed to be too _good_ for me!”

The figure paused and half-turned its head.

“My master has no thoughts to spare for your failure," it said. It dragged the words out, luxuriating over them like a cat purring over a slaughtered bird. “He promised you a new kind of pain. This is it, then: the pain of… _insignificance_.”

It was a good exit line. For one thing, it seemed to have _broken_ Loki, who remained on his knees, unmoving, staring at nothing.

A muscle twitched in his jaw.

The Dark Elf turned away as well, following the hooded figure. The soldiers surrounding Loki and Natasha advanced. They broke into two groups as they did so, and as Natasha had expected, the largest group of them moved to surround Loki. It was honestly depressing how quick people were to dismiss you as a useless incompetent once you'd shed a few tears.

She sat up.

“I want to go _home,"_ she said, as she sized up her opponents. In addition to the spears, each of the soldiers was armed with a knife and a belt full of what looked very much like hand grenades. “You’re all so _mean_!” She was hardly bothering to do the voice at all now.

The soldier closest to her drew back their spear. Blue energy crackled along the blade tip, and they lunged forwards.

Natasha dodged the blade easily. She grabbed the spear shaft and pulled, yanking the soldier straight into the path of the kick she was aiming at their chin. Their head snapped back and she scrambled up and over them, pushing off from their shoulders and into a somersault before landing astride the shoulders of the soldier behind them. She pushed her fist into their neck and hit them with the Widow's Bite, then jumped free as the soldier dropped to the ground. Dodging another spear thrust, she pulled a flash-bang from her belt and threw it to the ground, turning away as it went off. Even with her arm raised to cover her eyes, the flash turned the inside of her eyelids bright red, and she heard shouts of pain and curses from the soldiers.

She darted forwards and snatched one of the grenades off of the belt of the fallen Dark Elf before spinning away, ready to run – but she was stopped by a heavy arm that wrapped itself around her throat from behind.

“Ah,” Loki rasped. “Now _there’s_ the Black Widow I was _expecting_.”

Natasha grabbed the knife out of her belt. She tried to stab him, but he seized her wrist with his other hand and twisted it painfully.

“You’re making a mistake." She had to pull his arm away from her throat so that she could speak, he was holding her so tightly. “You heard them, they were going to kill you, too -.”

“Ah, but that was _before_.” He was going to snap her wrist if he twisted it any further. She dropped the knife, and he snatched it out of the air before it hit the ground. “But I’m in a position to do them a favour now – by slitting _your_ wretched throat.”

She could see the knife in his hand out of the corner of her eye. He tightened his grip and her feet almost left the ground, her toes scratching meaningless sigils in the sand as she sought for purchase, her fingers clawing uselessly at his arm.

He drew back the knife: but before he could strike, she struck him first.

“Is that what you think _she_ wants for you?" she demanded. She put everything she had into the words, aware that it was her life that was at stake. "Will that make her _proud_?”

The knife vanished as if by magic. His grip abruptly loosened and Natasha sagged onto the sand, sucking in breath after breath to fill her empty lungs. Tearing Loki's nerveless arm from around her neck, she spun around so that they were face-to-face. She grabbed him by the back of the head, forcing him down to her level so that she could speak into his ear.

“You’ve been inside Clint’s head. You know what I’ve done. You know what I _can_ do." She tightened her grip. It must have been painful, but Loki didn’t make a sound. "And she asked _me_ – she asked the _Black Widow_ for help, that’s how desperate she was. And now you’re going to throw that away? Everything she's done for you, you're just going to _forget_ it?"

His face was rigid as he stared past her. Around them the soldiers were staggering to their feet and gathering their weapons, some of them shaking their heads to clear them of the stars they must have been seeing. Natasha was aware of them in her peripheral vision. They were more careful now, having learned to be wary of their opponents and what they could do, but they had the advantage of larger numbers and superior weapons. Soon, one of them would grow brave enough to lead the charge, and when they did -

They were running out of time. Natasha tightened her grip on the grenade she had stolen and tried to weigh the risks of being blown up by an explosive whose capabilities she didn't know against the near-certainty of being stabbed to death.

A shout of surprise interrupted her calculations. One of the soldiers was standing with their spear in their hands, staring wildly at nothing. Their head twisted back and forth as they turned on the spot, frantically scanning the landscape.

One by one, the other soldiers began to shout and look around as well. No one was watching her or Loki at all now. Puzzled, Natasha turned away to try and see what was happening, and Loki grabbed her by the wrist.

“I can’t keep the enchantment going if you _let go!_ ” he hissed, and she realized that he must have made them invisible, the way he had been on the ridge. "Do you want to escape or not?!"

His grip on her was so tight that she could feel the bones grinding together in her wrist, but she didn't dare open her mouth to complain. The soldiers were prodding at the air with their spears now as they moved hesitantly about, like men wearing blindfolds, hoping to strike their prisoners though blind luck. Natasha stared straight into the eyeholes of one of them as she let Loki pull her through the crowd, and they looked right through her. Even for the Black Widow, accustomed to being seen only when she wanted to be, it was a deeply surreal experience.

Climbing the ridge was a lot more difficult than falling down it had been. They slid back one step for every two they took, almost going on their hands and knees for part of it, a process that was made all the more difficult by the fact that they were more-or-less holding hands. They were only halfway to the top when Loki lost his footing. He threw his hands out to break his fall, and instinctively let go of Natasha’s wrist.

Shouts broke out from down below. They had been spotted. Natasha took one look at the dark circles under Loki’s eyes and the waxy pallor of his skin, and didn’t bother asking him how he could have been so stupid.

It took him two tries to get back on his feet, and after that, they ran.

The Dark Elves swarmed and followed them. They hurled themselves at the ridge, and although they had no better luck finding purchase on the loose sand, there were more of them, and they had their spears to act as props. Their armour all but disappeared against the dark sand, and almost the only part of them that was visible was their white heads, bobbing and weaving as they struggled upwards.

At the foot of the ridge, a line of them dropped onto one knee and raised their spear-guns. Natasha pressed herself into the sand as blue bolts of light zipped and sizzled around her, smacking itno the sand and leaving smoking craters. She fumbled at her belt and threw down another flash-bang. A shout and a crashing, slithering sound suggested that the flare had made at least one of their pursuers lose their footing, but she didn't look back to see for herself.

They crested the ridge, Dark Elves hard on their heels. Their footprints were long gone, scoured away by the wind, but the map in her head remained.

 _Get to the cave,_ Natasha told herself as she dodged around the rocks and boulders, ducking and covering when one of those blue bolts shot past her head. Caves were defensible. They had a fighting chance of survival if they could make it to the cave.

 _But_ , said a voice in her thoughts, _the portal is in the cave. You're leading them straight back to Midgard. You ought to stop. Turn and face them. Protect your team. One last stand - one stroke, to cancel out all your debts. One stroke, and the ledger balances out, for good..._

The mouth of the cave stood stark and black before them. Natasha gritted her teeth and put on an extra bust of speed. One single act, to make up for everything she'd done? No forgiveness worth having was that easy. And besides, Last Stands were only ever any good when there was someone there to see them. Loki didn't count.

She hung back and let him scramble into the cave first, his harsh panting echoing off the stone walls, and threw a smoke-bomb behind them, hoping to disguise their passage and gain a little extra time. The smoke followed them into the cave, stinging her eyes and making it even harder to see in the dark, which, after the glare of the sun outside, appeared pitch-black.

Natasha coughed and stumbled as she tried to pull the phase-meter out of her belt. She didn't have enough hands to manage both it and the grenade she had stolen, so she tossed the latter to Loki. “Set that!”

He fumbled the catch and almost dropped it when he saw what it was. "Set it yourself!" he exclaimed, throwing it back to her.

Natasha was holding the phase-meter at arm's length, sweeping it back and forth as she searched for the portal. Its screen glowed with the image of the turning globe. She caught the grenade one-handed and shoved it at him again. “What is this, Hot Potato?! I don’t know how!”

“Oh, and I do?”

“You’re supposed to know about stuff like this!”

“How in _Hel_ am I supposed to know anything about explosive weapons that were invented by a race that's supposed to have been dead for the past five thousand years?!" he yelled, frustrated, and then stared in horror as a light on the grenade began to flash.

The phase-meter’s screen flickered. The image on it changed to the spiky, up-and-down line.

 _Beep, beep, beepbeepbeepbeep_ went the grenade.

The silhouette of a Dark Elf appeared framed in the mouth of the cave, wreathed with smoke. They shouted something, and raised their spear.

There was no time to stick around and find out what they wanted. Natasha smacked the grenade out of Loki's hands. She grabbed him, and hauled him through the portal as, just behind them, the bomb went off.

//


	23. Chapter 23

Hawk-eyed as he was, Clint couldn't help noticing that some changes had taken place since he had last seen the portal. He sniffed the air.

"Why does it smell like cat piss in here?" he blurted out.

Everyone was suddenly very reluctant to meet his eyes. A few puffs of fur drifted, dream-like, into the portal and disappeared.

The atmosphere on the landing was tense. Each of the Avengers was suited up and prepared for a fight. Captain America had his shield clipped to his arm. Mjolnir was in Thor’s hand. The repulsors in Iron Man’s gloves glowed as he kept them at low power, ready to fire. Clint had his bow and arrows. The Special-Ops team was armed with all the firepower at their command. Whatever came through that portal next was in for one heck of a fight.

The only point of calm, or at least of well-feigned indifference, was Darcy Lewis. The rest of the scientific staff and other non-combat personnel had been evacuated, but she had pointedly ignored all of Agent Sitwell’s polite suggestions, eventually escalating to undignified begging, that she leave.

“You know what this blinking light means?” she demanded, pointing to one of Dr. Foster’s machines. “You’ve been initiated into the mysteries of these little dial-things? You know how to hit this whatchamacallit to make it stop playing FM radio? No? Well, guess who has two thumbs and _does_.” She made finger guns and pointed them at the stairwell. “Dr. Foster does. But I’m not just a _close_ second, I’m your _only_ second.”

So she stayed.

She had found a label-maker somewhere in the abandoned offices of the factory, and during the period of interminable waiting that followed Natasha and Loki’s disappearance, she occupied herself with covering each and every piece of equipment with stickers reading ‘PROPERTY OF DR. FOSTER’, ‘DO NOT REMOVE – THIS MEANS YOU SHIELD’ and ‘PUT THIS THING BACK WHERE YOU FOUND IT OR SO HELP ME’.

She was carefully applying a label to her shirt that read ‘IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO DR. FOSTER’ when one of the machines began to beep.

“Huh,” she said. “That doesn’t usually do that,” and that was all the warning they had before Natasha came hurtling through the portal, dragging Loki behind her and yelling:

“ _Fire in the hole! EVERYBODY GET DOWN!!_ ”

As soon as her feet touched the landing, Captain America grabbed her and pulled her behind the shield with him.

“TAKE COVER!” he bellowed, dropping down on one knee and bracing for impact, and damn, there was something to that Captain America-voice, because Clint found himself automatically ducking and covering behind the largest and bulkiest of the Special-Ops guys without his body receiving any conscious instructions from his brain.

Everyone on the landing scrambled to drop and cover their heads.

And then an approximate _metric fuck-ton_ of sand came plummeting through the inside of the stairwell, like it was the world’s biggest rainstick. It formed an almost solid column, a hissing, seething torrent that buffeted Clint with a wall of sound that rang in his ears even after the last grain had dropped from the top of the portal.

It fell onto the top of the conical pile of sand at the bottom of the stairwell and bounced. There were a few hisses as some of the sand slid off the sides and onto the ground, and then – silence.

Agent Sitwell was the first one to get to his feet.

"Well," he said, adjusting his glasses. "That was -."

He dropped back on to the ground and covered his head with both hands as, all around the stairwell, Dr. Foster's machines erupted into sparks, accompanied by a chorus of snaps and pops. The acrid smell of burnt plastic filled the air, combining unpleasantly with the scent of cat urine.

Slowly, the team picked themselves up off the floor and dusted themselves off. Natasha uncurled herself from where she was pressed against Steve's chest and gave her head a shake, like a cat that had landed harder than it had intended to. She looked around and Clint saw her lock eyes with Loki, who was still on the ground, propped up on one elbow as he looked up at her. They made a motionless tableau amid the crowd of milling SHIELD agents, left adrift now that there was no clear threat to respond to.

Abruptly, Natasha thrust out her hand. Loki looked from it to her face, obviously surprised, and then reached up and let her pull him to his feet.

“Agent Romanov!” Director Fury roared, over the background mutterings of what-the-hell and was-that- _supposed_ -to-happen?s. “ _Report!_ ”

Loki dropped Natasha's hand and slouched away, ostensibly to examine the stairwell. Natasha herself was suddenly very busy shaking the sand out of her Widow's Cuffs. "I'll have it for you in twenty minutes, Sir."

"Loki," Thor said. " _What have you done?_ "

"Of course this must all be _my_ fault," Loki snapped. He looked exhausted and sick as he clung to the railing around the stairwell. "I don't know why I ever agreed to come here, I might have known you only wanted someone to blame when things went wrong."

There was something wrong with his hearing. Clint shook his head and stuck his finger in his ear. It didn't make a difference.

"Hey," he tried. "Has anyone else noticed that sound?"

No one seemed to know what he was talking about, and maybe they couldn't hear it, considering how much yelling was going on.

"How could it not be your fault? You _disappeared_ , Loki! What were you thinking?!"

"It was _your_ mortal lover who disappeared and started all of this in the first place, so if we're going to go around _assigning blame_ , may I state, for the record, that none of this would have happened if she hadn't stuck her nose in where it didn't belong -."

"You know that's not what I'm talking about! Stop trying to distract me!"

"Did you guys see Jane?" Darcy demanded. "What _happened_?"

"It's just," Clint continued, doggedly, "it's kind of persistent, and I'm wondering if it's just me, or -."

"What is the threat level, Agent, what are we dealing with?" Fury insisted.

"Threat level is minimal. Sir, please, I'll have a full report in fifteen minutes, I just need -."

"I need to know the situation, Agent Romanov, people's lives are at stake -!"

"- really kind of annoying, and I -."

" _And_ I'm not the one who dropped an anti-particle bomb in the center of a highly unstable phase-space distortion, so _that's_ not my fault -."

" _That's not what I'm angry about either!_ "

"EVERYONE SHUT UP!"

In the sudden, ringing silence that followed, everyone stopped and stared at Clint. Before he could reconsider his actions, he took advantage of being the sudden center of attention to demand: “Does anyone else hear that? Sort of a… high-pitched… buzzing?”

The agents looked at him. They looked at each other.

One by one, they shuffled aside to reveal, at the very back of the group, a terrified, sweating SHIELD agent, his eyes bugging out of his head as he held -

The Phase-Two Prototype. Coulson’s gun.

As they watched, the high, keening whine reached a crescendo and a red light on it began to flash.

“Son,” Captain America said, slowly. “I'm going to suggest that you put that down, and step away. _Now_.”

The barrel of the weapon zig-zagged erratically. Clint swore he could hear the agent's teeth chattering. He made a sudden movement as though he was going to drop the gun right then and there, and Steve lurched forwards and grabbed it before it could hit the ground.

It was hard to know, in retrospect, what exactly happened next, and for various reasons no one was ever especially keen to puzzle it out. Had the agent pulled the trigger? Did the fall jostle something loose? Or did the gun, having been charged, discharge itself automatically?

The end result, whatever the means by which it was reached, was that the gun was actually in Captain America's hands when it went off, and hit Loki right in the center of his chest.

It happened in the blink of an eye. The blast sent him flying backwards and slammed him into the railing around the stairwell. Rusted pipe and corroded rope gave way, unable to stand the strain, and tumbled in pieces into the stairwell. For a moment, Loki teetered on the edge of the landing, but he didn't have the strength to regain his balance. He threw out his hand, but there was no one close enough to grab it -

\- and he fell.

" _LOKI!_ "

Clint's ears popped as the air pressure dropped. All along his head and arms, he felt his hair gently lift and stand on end. Sparks began to flash across the barrel of the Phase-Two Prototype in Steve's hands. Dark clouds poured into the slice of exposed sky above their heads.

"Oh, spare me the theatrics," said a weary and exceedingly unimpressed voice from inside the stairwell. "The portal's been destroyed. You're overreacting. As usual."

Thor's mouth opened, and then closed. He blinked. Overhead, the storm clouds dissipated as quickly as they had arrived, allowing the sunlight to stream in once more.

One by one, the Avengers each crept up to the edge of the stairwell and looked down. Loki was at the very bottom, lying in the pile of sand that had come through the portal, inside of what was basically a Loki-shaped crater.

Clint, remembering Tony's pent-house floor, had to bite back hard on the sudden, very unprofessional impulse to laugh hysterically.

"Well, this is just _typical_." Loki sat up, sand trickling from his hair. "After everything I've done for you people."

"That's not -." Steve's face underneath the mask was beet-red. He abruptly shoved the Phase-Two Prototype into the arms of the SHIELD agent standing next to him, who staggered under the sudden weight. "That's not what that was -."

“The portal's gone?" Darcy said, disbelieving. "The portal's gone. The portal is _gone._ " Her expression changed, and suddenly she lunged forwards, incandescent with rage, and shoved Natasha hard with both hands. “ _Jane_ was on the other side of that, you stupid, _stupid_ -!”

Natasha was utterly caught off-guard by the attack, as well she might be. It was like seeing a capybara attempt to savage a leopard. “Sorry,” she said, helplessly. “I’m sorry. We'll fix it -.”

“ ‘Sorry’ doesn’t make it _better_! Stupid _SHIELD_ , and their stupid, bone-headed, _idiot_ -!”

“Darcy,” Thor said, gravely sympathetic, and Darcy spun on her heel and threw herself against his chest, where he enveloped her in a hug.

“- blowing things _up_ , like _maniacs_ ,” she muttered, balling her hands up into fists. There were tears in her eyes. “Fucking… _militarization_ of law-enforcement, ‘s what it is -.”

Natasha looked over at Fury. “I'll have your report in ten minutes, sir,” she insisted, quietly. “Please.”

Fury looked into her eyes for a long moment. He gave a terse nod. “Alright, people!” he yelled, and she turned away and vanished through the doorway. Clint tried to follow, but his way was blocked. “You heard Agent Romanov, you have _ten minutes!_ Captain Rogers, Iron Man, escort the asset onto the Quinjet!”

Steve hesitated, and then nodded. He turned to leave, but Thor's hand shot out and caught him in the center of his chest.

"No," he said. He sounded agitated. "No, I shall take him myself. None of you are to - I will go."

“Huh,” Iron Man said, as Thor went thundering down the stairs. “I guess those guns still have a bit of a kick to them. Good for a laugh, anyways.”

Steve turned on him with a glare of such intensity that even Clint, all the way on the other side of the landing, shied away from it. "I didn't," he insisted. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Tony flipped back the visor on the Iron Man suit. "Sure you didn't," he said kindly, and Steve's knuckles went white as he gripped his shield. "Come on, let's find out what there is to eat in this city. I could murder a kebab."

//


	24. Chapter 24

Dead flies fell as an ungentle rain from the spiders’ webs that covered the women’s washroom on the ground floor of the factory as Natasha slammed each of the cubicle doors open in turn to check that they were empty. The lock in the door was rusty but she forced it to turn, ignoring, for the moment, the question of how she was going to get it _unlocked_ later.

She needed time and space to think. Director Fury wanted her to make her report, and from the expression she had seen on Clint’s face back at the landing, just before she had escaped, _he_ had questions, too. They would have to be answered, as convincingly as possible - but she had questions of her own that needed answers, first.

Turning around and around in the confines of the washroom, she ran her thumb over the underside of her finger. The All-Mother’s gift was just barely detectable, a thin ridge against her skin.

 _I will be there. I will_ always _be there._

Natasha stopped pacing and closed her eyes.

_Only think of this moment, and I will be there…_

She forced herself to relax. She pushed aside all the fear and anger and frustration, and focused her thoughts on a paved courtyard, with birds in the vines, and the sound of a fountain…

The texture of the air around her changed. The hint of a breeze touched her cheek. Natasha took a deep breath, and turned around.

“He has his magic,” she said. “ _How does he still have his magic?_ ”

The placid smile of welcome vanished from the All-Mother’s face. “What has happened?” she demanded. “What have you done to him?”

The injustice of it took her breath away. “What have _I_ done to _him_?! _He’s_ the one who tried to kill _me_!” She paused to check the final tally and her outrage grew. “ _Twice!_ ”

“I am sorry.” The All-Mother’s eyes glittered like obsidian as she folded her hands inside her sleeves. “You sounded so confident in your ability to manage him. But I suppose hubris can lead even the famous Black Widow to overrate herself…”

“Oh, no.” Natasha stopped short in the middle of pacing around the courtyard and wheeled around to face her. “Don’t make this _my_ fault. I know what I can handle. Homicidal maniacs? Sure. Genocidal despots with delusions of grandeur? I’ve dealt with a few. But when he starts _making himself invisible_ -.”

The All-Mother scoffed. “Is that all? And here I thought from your reaction that he had done something _impressive_.”

“Maybe when you’re a _magic space Viking_ that’s just an ordinary Thursday, but invisibility is still a pretty big deal to us _primitive_ Midgardians!”

“Really, Natalia Alianovna, you make too much of a trifle.” The All-Mother turned and began to stroll leisurely about the border of the courtyard. “Loki’s abilities are not so different from your own. You, too, use deceit and misdirection against your foes. I am surprised to find you so upset. Or does the biter not enjoy being bitten?” She stopped with the fountain was between them. Her image, seen through the cascading water, rippled and shimmered like a mirage. “It does sometimes happen that a spider stumbles into another’s web. And then, how they _struggle!_ ”

Her expression was hidden but there was no mistaking the amusement, or the contempt, in her voice. Natasha stared after her, feeling the heat mount to her face from under the collar of her stealth suit.

How dare she? How _dare_ she say such things? She was the _Black Widow_! Out of all of them, _she_ had been the best. She alone had survived - had even thrived. And now this upstart _bourgeois_ housewife had the gall to stand in front of her and imply that she didn’t know how to do her job!

She would show her. She would show them all. She was going to go straight back to that factory, grab Loki by the throat, and –

At this point sober second thought intervened and tapped her on the shoulder. Perhaps, it suggested, she should think more about this. Perhaps she should recognize that her anger was making her blind, and maybe she should stop to wonder what traps, exactly, the All-Mother wanted her to be blind _to_.

Self-awareness sidled in too, and added: anyways, you can’t be mad at her for being right. Loki surprised you, and you don’t like being surprised. That’s fine. But you gain nothing by being angry about it now. Remember it instead. Remember, watch, and _wait_ …

The collar of her stealth suit was half-choking her. Natasha reached around and unbuckled it, pulling the zipper down an inch so she could breathe more easily. The cool air in the courtyard felt soothing against her overheated skin.

“I know when I’m out-gunned,” she said. She rubbed the back of her neck, and tilted her head from side to side to stretch her muscles. “It would be different if he didn’t have his magic, but he does.”

“You admit defeat, then?” The All-Mother turned her head away and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Oh! Very well. You seem to be giving up very easily, but I suppose it is no affair of mine. I had thought that your realm would be eager to show off its strength, but no doubt I was mistaken.” She stepped towards the trellis and lifted a flower that hung drooping on its stalk. “… Has Thor ever spoken to you of the Council of Worlds?”

“I don’t believe he has, no,” Natasha said carefully, unwilling to commit herself until she had seen where the All-Mother was leading her.

“I suppose he thought it would hardly concern _you_.” She snapped the stem and lifted the flower to breathe in its scent. “It meets on Asgard. Representatives from every realm attend, to discuss affairs of great weight and importance. Representatives from every realm, that is, but Midgard.”

There it was. The trap yawned beneath her feet once again. Only this time Natasha wasn’t to be goaded towards it – she was to be lured, the bait hanging invitingly over the lightly-disguised pit.

“The question of Midgard’s membership has been discussed in the past,” the All-Mother went on, resuming her stroll around the courtyard. “And every time, it has been rejected. Your realm is too young, they say. Too inexperienced, too little knowledgeable about the world. After all, you could not even defend yourself against the Frost Giants when they attacked. What could such petty, little creatures have in common with such as ourselves?”

“That was a thousand years ago!” Natasha protested.

“What do years matter, or the means by which we count them? Do you think the All-Father will be impressed, when you come to him and admit that you need his help? Do you think he will recognize the wisdom it took for you to reach such a decision? He won’t. He will only see that you are weak, and need his protection.”

Smiling, she stopped in front of Natasha and held the flower out to her. The petals of it were long and curved, coloured in rich shades of red and orange.

“I only want to _help_ ,” the All-Mother urged, her voice low. “I want to see Midgard made strong. Asgard has been unchallenged on the Council for too long. The other realms have had millennia to become accustomed to following wherever the All-Father leads. You could change that, you and the others. Only let me advise you, and you can earn the respect your realm deserves.”

A small green insect, a sweat-fly, or maybe a bee, clambered out of the flower onto one of the stamens. It shook its wings, which were dusted all over with yellow pollen, and buzzed away.

Natasha met the All-Mother’s eyes. They were blue, and wide, and oh so _earnest_.  But Natasha knew that trick, too.

“And where,” she asked, civilly, “would you like us to be lead instead?”

The All-Mother opened her hand and let the flower fall carelessly onto the paved ground. “I see that I have judged wrongly,” she said. She stepped forwards, crushing the petals beneath her foot. “You know, I only spoke to you because I pitied you. It wrung my heart to think of you exiled from your home, alone and among strangers – despised, mistrusted, with no one to speak to, no one who knows the innermost secrets of your heart.”

The hairs on the back of Natasha’s neck gently lifted and stood on end as the All-Mother stopped at her back. She could only just see her, in the very corner of her peripheral vision, but she was hyper-aware of her presence. The exposed back of her neck suddenly seemed terribly vulnerable.

“I know your history, Natalia Alianovna,” she said softly, speaking into Natasha’s ear. “I know _you_. So run along and tell the All-Father everything that Loki has done, how he has _frightened_ you. Ask him for his protection, and you will see how eager he is to reward a trespasser, and a _spy_.”

The word struck the back of her neck like a stiletto knife, or a poisoned dart. Natasha’s eyes rested on the fountain in the center of the courtyard. Its waters seemed impossibly distant in comparison with how hot she felt.

“I wasn’t spying.” The protest sounded weak even to her own ears. The word was both the noun and the verb, after all – it _was_ spying, because _she_ was the one who had done it. “I didn’t take anything, I didn’t -.”

“Only because you were interrupted. How lucky that you were discovered so quickly!” The All-Mother’s voice was soft and insinuating. “There are many artefacts of great power in the palace, after all. The rewards, had you been successful, would have been great.”

It sounded plausible. More than that – it sounded _true_. It echoed Natasha’s own fears, from the first time she had come face-to-face with the All-Mother. She knew what she was. She knew what it meant, to be caught someplace she shouldn’t be. Even if she protested her innocence until she was blue in the face, it wouldn’t matter. She was a spy, and everyone knew that spies told lies.

Natasha faltered. The exertion of her fall and the fight, followed by that long run across the black desert of Svartalfheim, seemed to catch up with her all at once and sandbag her across the shoulders. Her posture sagged. She felt tired, and dismayed.

“Why are you _threatening_ me like this?” she asked, plaintively. Her right knee had taken the brunt of the impact when she had hit the landing after coming through the portal, and she couldn’t quite smooth out the limp in her stride as she walked over to the fountain and sat down. “I did everything you wanted me to do. I got Loki to Midgard. You’re not being _fair_.”

The All-Mother remained standing. “Spare me your tears, Natalia Alianovna,” she said scornfully. “I know these tricks of old. I _am_ a mother, after all.”

Natasha pulled her leg up with a wince, and undid the zipper at her ankle. It was a relief to feel the air against her skin. “I never should have listened to you in the first place,” she complained bitterly. “You’ve been lying to me all along. The All-Father protected Midgard once, he’ll do it again. So what if he thinks we’re weak? We _are_. We need help. We need _him_.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the All-Mother make a brief, violent gesture with her right hand, as though shaking off a wasp that had stung her. “Very well. Go to him, then, and be beheaded for it.”

“I don’t think you mean that,” Natasha said shrewdly. She lay back on the rim of the fountain, wriggled her shoulders to get comfortable. The hard stone made her back ache pleasantly. It felt good to take some of the weight off. She closed her eyes. “ _I_ think you’re just trying to frighten me. The All-Father is a protector. He’s a good person. He’ll understand.”

“Oh, _yes_. He will _understand_ that you are a threat, a danger, something to be crushed out of existence and thrown away.” The acid in the All-Mother’s voice could have etched steel. “You think you can trust the All-Father? _Loki_ thought he could trust the All-Father. _He_ tried to show that he was worthy of Asgard, the only way he thought he knew how, and what did it end in but rejection, exile, banishment among the stars and a father dead at the hands of a child he never knew!”

Each word in the All-Mother’s tirade was louder than the last, mounting to a crescendo as her anger overmastered her, until she was almost shouting. The placid surface waters that Natasha had seen during their first conversation were all gone now, submerged by an undercurrent of fury that threatened to sweep them all over the edge of a cataract.

A cloud, scudding by, cast a brief shadow over the courtyard. The gurgling fountain sounded incongruously cheerful under the circumstances. With her eyes closed, Natasha could make-believe that it was night – that first night, with the moon overhead, and the All-Mother saying… something very different.

“The last time I saw you,” she said slowly, remembering, “you said that Loki was exiled after he killed the king of the Frost Giants.” It sounded absurd, but… _a father dead at the hands of a child he never knew_ … “He’s a Frost Giant?”

The leaves of the climbing vine nodded on their trellis as they were touched by a light breeze. A handful of dead leaves skittered across the flagstones, tumbling over one another like kittens at play before fetching up against the base of the fountain.

“Thor did say he was adopted,” Natasha mused. “I thought it was a joke, at the time.” Little bubbles of exhaustion seemed to course through her veins, making her thoughts fizz as they oscillated from doubt to certainty: could it be? It couldn’t be. Could it? “He doesn’t look like what I would expect a Frost Giant to look like. I mean, he’s not particularly giant-esque, is he? But he doesn’t like the heat.” She remembered the mark in the sand, and how long it had taken him to get to his feet after he had fallen. “It makes him weak. It _hurts_ him…”

“ _Stop_.”

Surprised, Natasha lifted her head. When she saw the All-Mother’s expression, she swung her legs down off the fountain and sat up.

The All-Mother, she remembered, didn’t know her through Thor. She didn’t know the Black Widow who was a member of the Avengers. She knew her the way Loki did. The way _Clint_ did.

The chill of the courtyard suddenly felt much less comfortable than it had before.

Natasha moved aside and patted the stone next to her. “Sit down,” she said, as gently as she could. “We need to talk.”

The All-Mother came, and sat. Natasha looked about the courtyard, because anything was better than looking at her face.

It was all exactly as she remembered it, except for the time of day. The carved stone of the fountain felt smooth and cool under her hands, and the sun felt warm against her cheeks. She could even smell the water from the fountain. It _felt_ real, and yet the empty washroom had been indisputably real, too. She had been there, and now she was here. Things like that didn’t often happen in well-ordered universes.

“What is this place, anyways?” she asked. “Where are we?”

The All-Mother cleared her throat and straightened her back, obviously making a great effort to answer normally, as though this was an ordinary conversation, between ordinary people. “You know of the spaces that exist between worlds?” she asked. “Well, this is a space that exists between minds. My gift helps me find you, once you have opened your mind to allow me in.”

Natasha bent and picked up a dead leaf, twirling its stem between her fingers. “So it’s an illusion?”

“Of a sort. I thought that meeting on familiar ground might help you to feel comfortable.”

The idea that the All-Mother had once thought it worthwhile to care about her _comfort_ was laughable. Natasha crushed the leaf and let the fragments fall onto the flagstones, watching her companion out of the corner of her eye.

The All-Mother looked old and tired, in ways that she hadn’t before, and a part of Natasha regretted it. She had grown up in the Black Widow Program after all, where the trainees had been accustomed to following the opinions and authority of the older women – their big sisters. They had been the goddesses of the Program, and Natasha had found an echo of their unselfconscious superiority in the All-Mother when they had first met – but that was gone now. Now she was an old woman, and afraid.

Natasha was sorry for her. But this was business.

“Tell me about Loki,” she urged.

The All-Mother dropped her eyes. Her hands moved mechanically in her lap, twisting up the fabric of her skirts. “The Casket of Ancient Winters wasn’t the only thing the All-Father took from Jotunheim,” she said. Her voice was low, and the words were all but lost in the susurration of the fountain. “He brought back a child as well, small and sickly, and he cloaked it with magic to hide its true nature and gave it to his wife to raise as their own.” She sighed. “The truth was hidden from Loki for a long time, and when he discovered it – he thought he had to make a choice, between the land of his birth and his adopted home. He chose Asgard. And Asgard… cast him out.”

A small grey-and-brown bird darted out from among the ivy. Natasha saw it winkle a seed out from between flagstones, and disappear back into the leaves.

“Gleipnir ought to have bound Loki securely,” the All-Mother said. “It _ought_ to have prevented him from using any of his magic at all. But he is already labouring under a great enchantment, the one that prevents his true nature from being seen, and in order to prevent that enchantment from being broken Gleipnir had to be weakened, with consequences that I do not think the All-Father entirely predicted. Hence how he has been able to deceive you. So long as Loki bears Gleipnir, there will be no conjured weapons; no hails of arrows, or summoned dragons; nothing _real_. But illusions… _He_ is an illusion, himself. It is no wonder that gift remains to him.”

The atmosphere around the fountain felt unbearably close. Impulsively, Natasha pushed off from her seat and walked to the far end of the courtyard, ostensibly to look up at one of the overhanging balconies. She could feel the All-Mother’s eyes on her.

She didn’t _want_ to know any of this, she thought, fiercely. It was too complicated, too twisted up with things she didn’t want to think about. But that was the thing about being a spy, wasn’t it? ‘Go and find out’ could be the motto of her trade, but there was no guarantee that what you found out would make you _happy_ …

“Perhaps I ought to have told you this before,” the All-Mother said behind her. “Perhaps you understand what it is to be caught between a past you do not want, and a present that will not let you forget it. But… I was afraid…”

That was enough. Natasha whirled about. (Her limp was gone now. It had served its purpose, and she had no further use for it.)

“Thank you,” she said, forestalling the All-Mother before she could say more, “for your cooperation. You’ve been very helpful.”

The All-Mother was intelligent enough to recognize that the conversation was over. She rose to her feet, smoothing out her skirts.  “I did not mean to be,” she confessed, and smiled. “You have a gift. I know you do not know your own mother, Natalia Alianovna, but I know that if she could see you, she would be proud of you – for surviving, if nothing else.”

Natasha knew that the sentiment was meant to strike a chord, but there was nothing inside of her for it touch. It rang hollow instead, like an empty, upturned bowl. 

“The Red Room was my mother,” she said. “If you knew me as well as you say you do, you would have known that.”

//

 


	25. Chapter 25

As SHIELD was an organization that was deeply concerned with the freedom of ordinary citizens, it was no surprise that their mobile command center came equipped with an interrogation room lined with a vibranium-alloy strong enough to resist even a super-powered human. Loki was escorted to it and left alone inside, with nothing to do but think.

He couldn’t stop staring at his hands.

It was a comparatively new quirk, one that he had developed courtesy of those few, life-defining minutes on Jotunheim. Any time he felt _too much_ : too hot, too cold, too tired, too upset – he had to reassure himself that he was still _himself_ , with his skin pale and unmarked, the way it ought to be.

For the moment, at least, it was. Thank the fates for small mercies.

When Loki was young, he had assumed that everyone was as affected by heat as he was: they were just better at hiding it. He had pushed himself to the utmost trying to keep up with Thor and the others, even though he paid for it with migraines and shuddering fevers that his mother cured with cold compresses and ice held to the back of his neck. It had been irritating, but he had been confident that if he just _tried harder_ he could be like the others, who didn’t have to go lie down on the cold stone floor of the library after an afternoon spent sparring in the sun.

He had felt positively betrayed when he had realized that other people didn’t drink hot beverages as a masochistic test of their pain tolerance, they actually _enjoyed_ the damned things.

Still, he had tried. No matter how many times he had slunk up to his mother’s chambers, pale and sweating and (in the worse cases) mildly delirious, he had tried to be like the others. He had tried to be Aesir.

Now, for the first time, he wondered what the whole situation had been like from his mother’s perspective. What must she have felt, watching him trying and failing, when she had known all along that what he was trying to do was impossible? Over and over again, whenever he had pushed himself too far, she had been the one who had to pull him back from the brink. She must have wished, sometimes, that he would just _stop_.

Perhaps now, when they told her what he had done, she would realize that he would never stop. He would always push too much, go too far. Perhaps _now_ she would give up on him, and leave him to spend the rest of his life wilting under the glare of Asgard’s golden prisons in _peace_.

Guilt writhed inside of him like a live animal. After all the effort she had put into getting him released – she had given him his freedom, and he had thrown it away. He had taken the chance she had given him and he had left it smashed in pieces in the ashes of Svartalfheim, as though it was a thing of no value. The memory made him want to shout, to pace, to pound his fists on the metal walls – but there were cameras, there _had_ to be cameras, and what if _she_ was watching? She had already seen too much. He had shown her more than he had intended. _Again_.

His eyes flickered down to his hands, resting on his knees. Was there a bluish cast to them? No – no, he had been misled by the colour of the veins under his skin, that was all. Or perhaps it was a trick of his eyes. He saw spots of coloured light every time he closed them.

There was sand under his fingernails, and the hangnail on his thumb had torn. He began unthinkingly to pick at it, and then remembered his mother and jammed his hand under his leg.

The sound of the lock turning caused his head to snap up. He pasted a smile onto his face as the door opened. It was too much to hope that the expression looked natural.

“How kind of you to stop by, brother,” he said, with false cheerfulness. He rose to his feet, determined to be a paragon of courtesy. “You look positively grim. I do hope everything is _quite_ alright?”

For a long moment, Thor didn’t speak. He only stood in the doorway and looked at him, his chest heaving under his breastplate. Inwardly, Loki faltered. They were going to drag him back to Asgard in _chains_. And that was assuming they left him any limbs to attach them to.

The door to the interrogation room remained open. Loki waited for the order to step outside, but it didn’t come. He frowned. Were they just going to stand here staring at one another for the rest of their over-long lives? The Bifrost couldn’t open up inside the Quinjet, after all.

“If I’m for the axe, then for mercy’s sake, just _swing_ it!” he snapped at last, driven to distraction by the continued silence, just as Thor said “You are to be allowed to move freely within the ship.”

They both stopped and stared at one another. Loki didn’t dare speak again. Surely he must have misheard. Thor couldn’t have just said -

“You are to be allowed to move freely within the ship,” Thor repeated slowly, as if to a child. “There is to be a counsel of war tomorrow, during which we will decide on our course of action. In the meantime, so long as you do not abuse the privilege, there is no reason for you to be confined to this cell.” He smiled, and the expression was humourless. “I know it is a small thing, but try to be satisfied, Loki. For once in your life.”

He turned on his heel as if to leave; and Loki, startled, blurted out: “That’s _it?_ ” Thor looked questioningly at him, and he scrambled to cover his confusion. “Where are you going to be?”

“Darcy Lewis informs me that, in order to recover fully from the stresses of the day, she requires waffles.” Thor swung Mjolnir up onto his shoulder. “Stark has recommended a most superior waffle vendor of his acquaintance, but as their place of business is two hundred miles away as the hammer flies, we shall be absent until the morrow.”

“Oh, _well_. Enjoy yourselves.” The words came automatically, without requiring anything in the way of input from his conscious thoughts, which were: Thor isn’t going back to Asgard. _He isn’t angry_. “I’ll leave a light on – although with what that flying fortress costs them to run, small wonder SHIELD’s first thought upon finding a magic space cube was to use it as a _battery_ -.”

“ _Loki._ ”

He shut up. It came, frankly, as a relief.

Thor stepped forwards. Loki stepped back automatically, until the back of his legs bumped up against the aluminum chair. He was hyperaware of Mjolnir in Thor’s hand. Even with Gleipnir dulling his senses, it fairly _reeked_ of power. It would only take one swing for Thor to accomplish what the modified Phase-Two Prototype hadn’t been powerful enough to manage, and send him straight through the wall.

“You have acted recklessly, Loki,” Thor said forebodingly. “You broke faith with us and, I may say, caused us all considerable distress.” He raised his hand. Loki flinched – but Thor only brought it down onto his shoulder, very lightly. “But when the one who has been the most greatly hindered by your selfishness speaks so eloquently in your defense, I cannot gainsay it. So. You have your freedom, Loki. For now.”

Loki stared at him. He felt adrift. None of this was going according to script.

“ _Who_ ,” he said, eventually. “Said _what_.”

“I speak of Lady Natasha, of course,” Thor said, surprised. “She is the one who has argued, most convincingly I may say, that you ought not to be confined. More than that – she has generously credited you with giving us the key to Jane’s disappearance.”

A smile burst across his face, as sudden and transforming as a sunrise. He leaned closer.

“Do you know,” he confided, “I think she’s rather impressed with you.”

And he actually _winked_ before he clapped Loki on the shoulder and walked off, whistling.

//

Loki stayed in the interrogation room for as long as he could bear it. Obviously the Black Widow had some kind of a scheme afoot. Well, he wouldn’t play. If she thought he was going to go trotting out there and straight into her web, then she had another thought coming. He was going to sit right there until _she_ came to _him_.

He was going to _stand_ right there until she came to him.

He was going to pace around the interrogation room until she came to him, and _damn_ her to the shit-freezing wastes of Jotunheim’s coldest mountain, _where was she?_

//

The interior of the ship was quiet, filled only with the low hum of the air-circulation system. Once, Loki passed a closed door, on the other side of which he could hear voices, but he saw no one in the corridors or in the glass-walled laboratories. He stood for a long time in front of the latter, examining the lock on the door. It was the kind that opened when you swiped one of those plastic cards the agents carried on lanyards around their necks, and it wasn’t as though it would be _hard_ to –

He gritted his teeth, and tore himself away.

A flight of stairs led up to the second floor. Here were the areas set aside for recreation, not work. There was a row of dormitories, and a recreation area filled with soft furnishings and a game table of some sort. Loki poked doubtfully at one of the coloured handles protruding from it. Little men swung from poles suspended over the table’s surface, like dead men impaled on spears. Their existence appeared even more futile, and their range of motion even more circumscribed, than that of pawns on a chessboard. The sight depressed him immeasurably.

A slight noise caught his ear. Loki looked out into the corridor. There was a light on in the doorway at the very end, and sounds of movement. He hesitated. It had been easy to be bold when there had been no one to see him, but now that he knew there was someone there, the temptation to creep back into the interrogation room and close the door behind him was nearly overwhelming. After all, the list of people on-board the ship whom he looked forwards to encountering was, practically speaking, nil.

Nevertheless, he steeled himself and moved forwards, comforted by the knowledge that while _he_ might see someone he didn’t have to be seen by _them_ , not if he didn’t want to be.

The doorway led to a small kitchen area provided for the comfort and convenience of SHIELD’s agents. A light was on over the sink and there, standing up on her toes to reach something on a shelf that was just a little bit too high for her, was Natalia Alianovna Romanova.

Loki stopped and stood watching her. This was the Black Widow, he reminded himself. The Russian Avenger. The Red Death. But she didn’t look like any of those things now. She had exchanged her black stealth suit for an absurdly over-large sweater and a pair of soft pants, and looked more like an advertisement for organic breakfast cereal than anything.

The sight irritated him beyond endurance. As if it was really so easy. As if all she had to do was change her clothing, and her past would be forgotten, herself made harmless. It was an insult for her to think so. Others might forget who she was, but _he_ never would.

“ _There_ she is,” he drawled. Her back was to him, but she didn’t start with surprise, or even turn her head. His annoyance with her grew. He stepped forwards and leaned against the doorframe. “The Black Widow triumphant; the Black Widow ascendant.”

“There _you_ are,” she countered lightly, without looking up from the box of tea she had taken down from the cupboard. “I hope you don’t mind that I gave the report myself. I kept it short. It’s been a long day, and everyone’s tired.”

“Oh, I heard about your _report_ ,” he goaded. “You seem to have left a good many things out, but I suppose you needed the time to brag about your own accomplishments. You ought to be proud. There aren’t many of your kind who succeed at making themselves a legend on _two_ realms.”

There were two coffee mugs on the counter in front of her. They made Loki think of a gambling game played on Asgard with three upturned cups and a dried knucklebone. The object was to guess which of the cups the bone was underneath, an objectively simple task that grew to one of insurmountable difficulty in proportion to the amount of mead consumed by the participants. Generally speaking it was a game that Loki found intolerably stupid, but as he watched her hands move over the mugs he caught a strain of the same heightened suspense that the gamblers must have felt before the cup was turned over: the anxiety of _not knowing._ He didn’t know how she was going to react. Would she be angry? Violent? Threatening? If he only _knew!_

He stepped closer, hoping to provoke her into giving something away. He loomed head and shoulders above her in the small space, but if she felt intimidated, she gave no sign of it. Instead she motioned him aside, and he had to change places with her so that she could unhook a plastic drip-coffee filter from a hook on the wall. On the counter, an electric kettle let out a long, rasping exhalation as it prepared to come to a boil.

“Imagine the stories they must be telling about you on Svartalfheim!” Her continued non-reaction nettled him. He might as well have been addressing the light fixture for all the attention she paid to him as she pulled open a drawer and got out a spoon. “From their perspective, you came out of nowhere and vanished just as precipitately. They’ve probably made you into a demon by now. You’ll haunt their nightmares tonight – the monster that lurks in the shadows, the witch with flame-coloured hair -.”

The drawer slammed shut with a bang, startling him into silence. Natasha turned swiftly towards him and the expression in her eyes made him take a step back.

“Is this how you want to do this?” she demanded. She was still holding the spoon – an instrument that suddenly seemed replete with understated menace. “Do you _want_ me to be the knife in your back, the bamboo slivers under your fingernails? Because I _can_. I can be anything you want me to be.”

She stepped towards him and, alarmed by the unexpected proximity, Loki jerked back – forgetting, in the heat of the moment, the open cupboard behind him. The back of his head smacked violently against the edge of the door, sending a sharp, lancing pain through his skull and down his spine. Bewildered by the shock, he had the confused, muddled thought that _she_ was somehow responsible, that she had somehow slipped around and struck him from behind.

He panicked. Reaching out, he grabbed the fabric of space and wrapped it around himself so that, in the blink of an eye, he disappeared. 

Natasha’s expression abruptly shut down. It was the only sign she gave of being surprised. Her countenance showed only a faint air of boredom as she stared at the place where he had been. Loki stared back at her, unseen, as he stood stock-still, gripping the counter at his back with both hands.

Very slowly, Natasha stretched out her hand until her forefinger was pressed against his chest. Loki held his breath, hardly even daring to blink, as she walked her fingers up his sternum, over his throat, and onto his face – where she tweaked his nose, hard.

“Cute,” she said, amused. “I bet you were _great_ at playing hide-and-go-seek when you were little.”

She turned away to drop a teabag into one of the mugs. Loki shook off the illusion that had hidden him, feeling angry and ashamed.

There was nothing she could _do_ to him, he reminded himself, furious. None of the punishments she could inflict and none of the tortures she could force him to endure were capable of causing him more than transient harm. Compared to her, he was _immortal_. He had already been tested – and while he may have bent, he had never broken. He was himself still: unique and inviolable.

He reached up and gingerly touched the back of his head. The skin was tender, but at least there was no blood.

“That looked painful,” Natasha observed. “Would you like some ice for it?”

Her tone was neutral and she placed no special emphasis on any one word; and yet Loki’s head snapped up like a deer’s at the sound of a rustling in the grass. Next to her, on the counter, the noise of the kettle reached a crescendo as the water in it came to a rolling boil. But surely she didn’t – she _couldn’t_ –

“Or a drink?” she urged. “Something _cold_. You must be parched.” She knelt and opened the mini-fridge under the counter. “Svartalfheim was very dry, after all. Dry, and _hot_. I’m sure you noticed. Try this.”

She straightened up and held a glass out to him. From it, Loki caught the scent of coffee. It attracted and repulsed him at the same time: _coffee_ meant _hot water_ meant _migraines_ , and yet – well, brainwashing could go both ways. His first instinct was to refuse, but…

There was ice inside the glass. Condensation beaded its sides. You could make coffee with _ice_. This changed everything.

“I don’t want it,” he lied, nervous. He was beginning to panic. He didn’t _understand_. “I don’t want anything from you.”

Natasha’s eyebrows lifted as she set the glass down on the counter. “Why not? I thought that was what I was supposed to be. A - what was it you called me, last time?”

Loki froze, in the process of eyeing the distance to the door. Could this have all been to make him apologize for calling her a mewling –?

“– a _balm_ , that was what you expected.” She lifted the electric kettle off its stand. “Remember?”

“I was expecting to be tortured, then,” he reminded her. He didn’t dare look away from the stream of scalding water, which grew and contracted as she lifted the kettle up and down, filling the two mugs.

“And you _have_ been.” The tone of her voice changed, and became caressing. “How you must have _suffered_ , all alone in that interrogation room! Nothing to do but sit and think about what happened, reliving every painful humiliation…”

Involuntarily, Loki’s gaze flickered up to the unblinking red light in the far corner of the kitchen ceiling. SHIELD had eyes everywhere – had he been right, had there been cameras in the interrogation room, too? Had she been watching him? Did she _know?_

“It’s a shame, how you’ve been treated.” She unwrapped the string from around the handle of the mug and swirled the teabag around as it steeped. “Disrespectful, _I_ call it. Just because they have Jane Foster, now they think they don’t need _you._ ”

Her hand moved round and around over the mug. The motion was hypnotic, and as Loki listened he found that he was unconsciously nodding along. It _was_ a shame, it _was_ disrespectful, she was right, she was - _hang on_.

“You don’t know they have Jane Foster,” he said. “I certainly didn’t see her there. Did you?”

“She would have ended up on Svartalfheim after she went through the portal,” Natasha pointed out. She drew the teabag out of the mug and dropped it into the garbage can.

“That doesn’t mean she’s still there. She could be dead,” he suggested, without any real hope.

“There was a second portal next to the ship,” she reminded him. “The Dark Elves looked like they were guarding it. If phase-space distortions can form loops, they could form pockets, couldn’t they? It could be a prison.”

Loki gave up. “That was my thought,” he admitted, settling back against the counter. He eyed the glass of iced coffee longingly. Would it be conceding defeat for him to ask her for it? “Jane Foster has abilities that would make her an asset to any number of ambitious people, and opening the Foster Bridge to Svartalfheim proved it.”

“Good!”

“… ‘Good’?” he repeated, disbelievingly. She was kneeling in front of the mini-fridge again, rummaging about inside of it in search of something, so he couldn’t see her expression to tell if it was a joke. “I realize the implications probably elude you, but the _last_ time the Dark Elves were seen, they tried to destroy the universe. All of the universes, in fact. Including yours,” he added, in case she wasn’t getting it.

“I know that.” She popped to her feet in triumph, clutching a glass jar. The paper label on it was printed all over with illustrations of strawberries. “It’s _good_ because it means we want the same thing. We both want to bring Jane Foster home safe and sound.”

“Jane Foster has never meant anything to me,” Loki said, as she popped the lid off the jar and dug a spoon inside. “I couldn’t care less what becomes of her.”

“Really? That’s not how I see it.” She dunked the laden spoon into the mug of tea. Loki stared.

“Did you – did you just put _jam_ in there?” he demanded.

Natasha stuck the spoon in her mouth and raised her eyebrows at him.

“Jam is for _toast_.” He felt completely unmoored. Every certainty in his life was being overturned. “There’s a sugar bowl _right there_! Why would you _do_ that?”

“Don’t criticize how I make my tea,” she said severely. “If we’re going to be making personal remarks, _your_ helmet makes you look like a space goat.”

“Fine. Fine! So, the Dark Elves have Jane Foster. It’s nothing to do with _me_.”

Natasha looked sideways at him. “It is if you want to get back at them.”

The spoon clinked against the rim of the mug as she stirred.

“… Go on.”

“I’m just saying.” The steam from the mug framed her face as she lifted it to her lips. “We could go back to Svartalfheim. We could steal Dr. Foster out from under the Dark Elves’ noses, and make their defeat as catastrophically humiliating as possible so that they never try anything like this ever again. I thought the idea might appeal to you. Was I wrong?”

Loki turned the offer over in his mind. The more he considered it, the better it sounded. He _had_ been insulted. Humiliated, even. It couldn’t be allowed to stand. Thinking back to the attack on New York, he felt ashamed and embarrassed. His mother had been right. A frontal attack, one that relied on an overwhelming superiority of numbers, wasn’t his style. His skills lay in other, more subtle directions. Perhaps it was time to use them.

Natasha, he was aware, was watching him closely. She moved aside, and indicated the glass of iced coffee at her elbow with a glance and a tilt of her head. It was as good as an invitation and this time, he didn’t refuse. He had to step closer to her to reach it, close enough that he could look down into her face. She didn’t move away. She looked up at him through her eyelashes, a small smile playing about her lips.

“A toast,” she proposed. She held her mug out towards him. “To the success of our mission.”

Loki considered it. He considered _her_ , this person whom he had threatened, insulted, fought, and tried to betray, and who now stood there and offered him – not _forgiveness_ , exactly, but a purpose. A _partnership_.

He touched the edge of his glass to hers.

“When do we start?”

//


	26. Chapter 26

_The project is going really well._

_She hasn’t solved all of the equations, not yet, but she’s getting there. It’s all coming together now. The puzzle box isn’t open yet, but she’s beginning to see where the hidden latches must be, where to twist and squeeze to get the lid off._

_And hey, the whole ‘box’ metaphor must have been more apt than she thought, because as she’s been getting closer and closer to solving the puzzle, it’s as though the actual, physical box has begun appearing in her lab, right in the middle of the floor. It’s big, much bigger than the carved, wood puzzle boxes she’s seen in gift shops, and it feels… weird. Somehow its edges are sharper, its shape more defined and its colours more saturated than anything else in the lab. It’s as though someone has taken a giant eraser and scrubbed the middle of the lab with it, and in doing so has peeled off the image of her cluttered, familiar workspace to reveal the Box underneath._

_The Box deserves the capital letter. It’s enormous, and carved out of dark stone. Jane, however, does not intend to let the mere physical existence of the Box, as strange though it might be, interfere with her work. The puzzle box metaphor has turned out to be more literal than she had expected, but that doesn’t change the nature of the project._

_She’s startled by a knock at the door. She can’t remember anyone ever knocking at that door before._

_“Hey, boss-lady! Open up already!”_

_Jane relaxes. It’s only Darcy._

_“Little busy right now,” she calls, already back to skimming over the numbers on the page in front of her. A thought strikes her, and she frowns. “Don’t you have your keys? Open it yourself.”_

_“Can’t,” Darcy says, promptly. “My hands are full. Come on and open the door, I’ve got co-ffee!”_

_She draws the last word out in a coaxing, sing-song tone, as though she’s offering the most tempting thing in the world. Which, yes, coffee is pretty great, but…_

_“I’ve already got coffee,” Jane says, bemused. There’s a steaming mug of it right by her hand. She doesn’t remember it being there a moment ago, but it’s freshly-brewed, and hot._

_“I’ve got food, too!” Darcy’s voice is muffled by the door, but she suddenly sounds uncertain. “I’ve brought you… that food you like! You’ve got to eat_ something _.”_

_Jane frowns. They order the same thing from Izzie’s diner for lunch every single day (two coffees and an entire pie, because Isabella’s pie is magical and Darcy does not understand the word ‘moderation’), but it sounds like Darcy’s managed to forget what that is._

_Oh well. Everyone’s a little absent-minded sometimes._

_“I’m not hungry,” she says, and it’s true. “Eat it yourself.”_

_Darcy protests, but Jane doesn’t listen. She’ll get bored and wander away eventually. Jane feels guilty about ignoring her, but Darcy deserves some time off. She can spend the afternoon (or is it morning? Jane isn’t sure) doing her own thing, instead of tagging around after Jane, fetching coffee and journal articles and asking inane questions about which B-movie monster would win in a fight. And in the meantime, Jane can focus entirely on her project, on the Box, because she’s so close to opening it._

_The Box sits in the middle of the floor, solid, immovable. If Jane were a fanciful person, she might say that it seems more real, somehow, than the rest of the lab, but Jane is a scientist, with letters after her name, and she does not say fanciful things. It’s just a trick of the light._

_That’s all._

_//_


	27. Chapter 27

The plan was simple. Get back to Svartalfheim, get Dr. Foster, and get out.

That didn’t mean it was going to be _easy_.

//

Clint slept uneasily that night, and not just because of the coffee Natasha had made for him after the briefing.

(She always put sugar in it. Clint didn't take sugar in his coffee, he drank it black, but in spite of all her super-spy training Natasha didn't seem to have noticed that, and by this point it had gone on for so long that he couldn't tell her to stop. He didn't have the heart.)

It was becoming more and more obvious to him that the effects of the brain-washing _hadn’t_ dissipated entirely when Natasha had punched him. There had been the library to start with, and the words he shouldn’t have been able to read. _Psychic-bleed through_ Tony had called it, and he was right, there were things in Clint’s head now that had no business being there. He hated thinking about it – but he _had_ to think about it. He had to second-guess himself, had to ask – are these _my_ thoughts? Is this _really_ how I’m feeling? Or are these the thoughts I’m being made to think because of how someone else feels?

It was confidence-destroying. He wondered why Fury hadn’t pulled him aside already, hadn’t told him to go home, son, pet your dog, and schedule some sessions with the psych team while you’re at it. And yet, the very thing that made him the weakest link in the Avengers under the circumstances was also what made him their best asset. He _knew_ Loki, in a way that none of the rest of them did. He knew how he thought, and what he was capable of – all the things he could do, and had done, in pursuit of his fucked-up goal of world domination. And so, even though just the sight of him made Clint’s skin crawl, he was going to stick it out. He would stay.

 _Someone_ had to keep an eye on the bastard.

//

The Airborne Mobile Command Center was a modified Globemaster that came equipped with everything a SHIELD team was expected to need during a mission, including a conference room for briefings and tactical planning sessions. The table in the center of it currently displayed a blue holographic model of the surface of Svartalfheim, the fruit of Natasha’s labours from early that morning.

“This isn’t going to be like fighting the Chitauri,” Steve remarked, rubbing his thumb along the edge of his jaw as he thought. He wasn’t in uniform, but the focused attention he was bringing to bear on the problem at hand was vintage Captain America. “They’re not bringing the fight to us; we’re going to be bringing the fight to them. What’s your estimate of the size of their forces?”

“I _saw_ about a hundred soldiers.” Natasha keyed in a command on her tablet, and the image over the table zoomed into the valley, where a sleek, lethal-looking ship was stuck upright in the sand like a thrown knife. “But if this thing is filled with troops – there could be thousands.”

“I don’t like the idea of pitting ordinary SHIELD agents against an army,” Steve mused. “What about Asgard?”

“I wouldn’t count on them. According to Thor, phase-space disruptions are popping up all over the Nine Realms, and raiding parties are using them to appear and disappear at will. They’re keeping All-Father busy.”

“So we’re on our own,” Steve supplied. “Against – _that_.”

He indicated the image of the spaceship and, next to it, the strange-looking doorway that marked the location of Jane Foster’s presumed prison.

Watching him, Natasha felt a sense of pride. She had observed Steve closely in the weeks and months after he had joined SHIELD, and she knew that life in the future hadn’t been easy for him. But now, with a mission in front of him and a team behind him, he was a different person from the slightly sheepish figure who haunted the halls of the Triskelion like a lost puppy. He was focused. Alert. This wasn’t Steve Rogers, Man Out Of Time. This was _Captain America_ , and she was proud to have him as a teammate.

On an impulse, she bumped his arm with her shoulder. He looked startled, but took it in stride.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “We’ve got time to come up with a plan.”

After all, they still had to figure out how they were going to get back to Svartalfheim in the first place.

//

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, as Clint lay tossing and turning, he became convinced that he was deeply aware of the psychic link connecting him to Loki. With each hour that crept past the certainty grew, along with his sleep-deprivation, that he could _feel_ Loki’s presence beneath him, pacing back and forth inside the interrogation room on the lower level of the Globemaster. The knowledge had brought him a perverse kind of comfort. He would have preferred to have Loki back inside his prison cell on Asgard, but since he was here, it was better to know exactly where he was than not.

It had come as a rude shock, then, when he had dragged his exhausted carcass out of bed the next morning, to discover that Loki hadn’t spent the night in the interrogation room at all. He hadn’t even been on board the Globemaster. Instead, he been inside the abandoned factory, assisting Natasha in converting one of the rooms on the ground floor into a secondary headquarters.

The ache in the pit of his stomach was probably from SHIELD’s terrible coffee, Clint told himself. Drinking it was like dousing his gastrointestinal system with battery acid. He would eat a couple of rice crackers later, when he had the chance, and then he would feel better. He hoped.

Still, his terrible misgivings and forebodings of disaster aside, he had to admit that having the extra space came in handy. The Globemaster was pretty plush, as far as SHIELD quarters went, but it could be a little cramped. And, as far as Clint was concerned, the greater the physical distance between him and Loki, the better.

They were currently on the opposite sides of an enormous circular conference table, which didn’t stop Clint from staring holes into the side of Loki’s head as he explained the background for the mission to the rest of the team ( _sans_ Steve and Natasha, who were off doing something leader-y on board the Globemaster), in what Clint considered to be an unnecessarily condescending manner.

“It’s called the Aether,” Loki was saying. “A piece of the eternal darkness that existed before there was light in the universe. Fluid, ever-changing, and all-consuming. A destructive force of near-infinite power.”

 “Cool,” Tony said. He was wearing sunglasses even though they were indoors, and the sight gave Clint a feeling of solidarity. All of the fancy Ray Bans in the world couldn’t disguise the fact that the inventor looked at least as haggard as Clint felt. “Eternal darkness, Dark Elves. There’s kind of a theme going on there, I get it.”

“I know of this Aether,” Thor supplied from where he was helping Darcy to unpack a crate full of Dr. Foster’s equipment, which had been salvaged from the landing. “During the last Convergence, Malekith of the Dark Elves sought to use it to plunge all the Nine Realms back into the darkness from whence they came. But it has not been seen since Bor hid it, somewhere it would never be found.”

“The Dark Elves haven’t been seen until now either,” Loki pointed out. “It was assumed that Bor had killed them all. And yet, here we are: the Convergence approaches, the barriers between the realms are weakened, and Dark Elves threaten the peace of the World Tree once more. And, on Midgard, a mortal possessing an almost uncanny ability for getting into places she shouldn’t, disappears. Coincidence? Perhaps. But _probably_ not.”

“Hey!” Darcy snapped. She scowled at him. “Yes, Jane is a crazy super-smart genius, and sure, I bet she could find this magic darkness or whatever, no problem. But one thing she would _never_ do is help bad guys get their hands on a world-ending WMD. No matter _what_.”

“She may not know that’s what she’s doing,” Loki insisted. “I agree, Jane Foster would be a difficult person to coerce, since she seems to have the same sense of self-preservation as a concussed duckling -.”

“ _Loki_ ,” Thor said wearily, but Darcy shrugged and nodded like it was a fair point.

“ – but if it was presented to her as an intellectual problem, if they placed her in familiar surroundings, and gave her a fascinating puzzle to solve, she might never stop to think that something was seriously wrong.” Loki pulled a pencil out from where he had tucked it behind his ear before scribbling a note on one of the pieces of drafting paper that covered the conference table.

Clint had thought that it was impossible for him to hate the man (god, pain-in-the-universe’s-ass, whatever) any more than he already did. _And yet._

“Fortunately,” Loki resumed, “our way forwards is clear. All we have to do is repair Dr. Foster’s equipment and use it to return to Svartalfheim, where we will break her out of her intradimensional prison before she can accidentally unleash a force of infinite destruction that will doom all of existence.” He tapped the drafting paper with his pencil. “All _you_ need to do is follow my instructions.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Sure,” he said. “Because we’re all just _agog_ to go leaping off whatever cliff you’re pointing us at.” He snatched the topmost sheet of paper out from under Loki’s hand and examined it closely. “The hell?! These aren’t even proper numbers! What _is_ this?!”

“It’s the Vanir-derived base-18 counting system for calculating intersections in nine dimensions, _obviously_ ,” Loki said, witheringly. “And saying they aren’t ‘proper’ numbers betrays a Midgardian-centric and, frankly, primitive attitude that is absolutely typical of this provincial backwater of a realm -.”

“Oh? Oh?? Like you’re not doing this on purpose! ‘Ineffable numbers’, what the hell is an ineffable number?!”

“I can hardly be expected to define it for you, can I? They’re _ineffable_.”

“What is the problem?” Thor demanded, looking up from the crate. A thin stream of sand fell from the piece of equipment in his hand. “Loki, what have you done now?”

“My _job_ , is what I’ve done -,” Loki protested, as Tony exclaimed: “‘Follow my instructions’, he says. Only he’s gone and written it in honest-to-god _runes_ -!”

 “Ah,” Thor said slowly. “Yes. Perhaps I should have anticipated this…”

“Yeah?” Tony slapped the papers against his chest. “Well, guess what, Charles Atlas. _You_ get to be our fact-checker now.”

“Oh, _good_ ,” Loki said. He leaned back against the table with the air of a man settling in to watch a show. “This _will_ be fun.”

Reluctantly, Thor took the papers. He shuffled them around so that they were all the right-side up, and squared the corners. “Of course.” His eyes darted to each of them in turn, and then down at the paper. He coughed.

“… Well, this is just perfect,” Tony said.

“In my defense, it has been a very long time since I have had to perform such calculations,” Thor protested. “Centuries of your time, in fact. They are seldom necessary.”

Loki tutted. “For shame. Think of how disappointed Heimdall would be if he knew how little you remembered from his lessons.”

“Yes, I’m sure he would be so heart-broken that he would entirely forget about the time you _froze him in a pillar of ice_ ,” Thor shot back.

Loki rolled his eyes. “We don’t have time for this. We need to get to work, and quickly. The Convergence has already begun, and if Dr. Foster finds the Aether for Malekith any time within the next few days, then the universe and everything in it is doomed.” He folded over a corner of the paper and tore it off. “We’ll need these materials to start with.”

And he held the paper out to Clint.

Clint stared at it. He stared _only_ at it, because if he looked up at the impatient, well-what-are-you-waiting-for expression that he suspected was on Loki’s face at that moment, he was going to launch himself across the table and wrap his hands around the bastard’s throat.

“I am not,” he said, and his voice sounded harsh and far-away to his own ears, “your fucking _gopher_!”

Loki frowned. “But you did such a good job, last time,” he said, as though this was a perfectly reasonable and even flattering thing to say and not, e.g., justifiable grounds for homicide.

During his brief time as a brainwashed lackey, Clint had heard a lot about the inferiority of Midgardians: how their lifespans were so short, and their bodies so fragile, and so on, and so forth. Loki had seemed to consider himself almost immortal by comparison. Clint was denied the opportunity of testing this presumptive immortality for himself only by the pile of drafting paper, which caused his feet to slip out from underneath of him as he threw himself across the conference table at Loki. Before he could recover, Thor grabbed him around the waist.

“Going to – _kill_ ,” Clint wheezed, clawing at the air as he strained to reach Loki.

“You are upset,” Thor stated. Clint hadn’t realize he was on a superhero team with _Captain Obvious_. “Please, Hawkeye, calm yourself. Loki is injured – there would be no honour in challenging him to physical combat now.”

Behind Thor, Loki made a show of rubbing at his ribs and wincing theatrically. Clint redoubled his efforts to get at him, but the only forward path lay straight through Thor.

“- _bastard_ thinks he can play us like a goddamn autoharp –.”

“Hawkeye, I beg you, cease this -.”

“- doesn’t even have the decency to be _subtle_ about it!” Suddenly he was swinging wildly, landing uncoordinated punches on Thor’s huge and insensible bulk as he fought to get his hands around the neck of that scheming, untrustworthy, disrespectful, _illegitimate,_ _son of a_ -

“ _CLINTON FRANCIS BARTON!_ ”

Clint jumped, startled, and shrunk back, already feeling preemptively guilty. Natasha was standing in the doorway with one hand on her hip as she held back the plastic curtain.

She tilted her head a little to one side, and smiled. He felt a chill run down his spine.

“Could I have word with you?” she asked, as sweet as cyanide. “In _private_?”

//

The first thing Clint said to Natasha, once she’d hustled him out of the factory and into the recreation room on board the Globemaster, was “It’s fine”, which was so obviously a lie that she ignored it entirely.

Instead, she waited in silence as he paced around the perimeter of the room, checking the view from the windows and flinging himself down onto each of the couches in turn until he found the one that was the most comfortable. He drummed his fingers on the armrest, jiggling his foot and avoiding her eye.

Natasha noted the shadows under his eyes and the ragged state of his fingernails. It was obvious that he hadn’t slept well, and she was appalled to find that the greater part of her just… didn’t care. Worse than that, she actually _resented_ him for being so difficult. The few hours of sleep she’d managed to snatch hadn’t exactly been restful either (her dreams had been haunted by evil Teletubbies, which was not something she had ever expected would happen, and hoped never would again). All she wanted now was to finish the mission. They didn’t have _time_ for dramatics.

So you were brainwashed, she wanted to say, so what? Just _get over it_. _I_ did.

But Clint deserved better than that. She searched for something more sympathetic to say, dismayed by her own lack of empathy.

“If you want to recuse yourself from the mission…” she began, carefully.

Clint’s head snapped up. “I don’t.” He had been picking at a hole in his jeans, and little bits of lint littered the couch cushions. “I wouldn’t do that to you. To the team,” he amended, lamely.

Natasha reminded herself that she was being a _friend_. Friends didn’t grab friends and shake them until they began to act sensibly, not even when they really deserved it.

“Everyone would understand. No one would blame you,” she insisted. “Or you could ask for housing off-site, or take half-days. Sign out a jet and go visit Stark’s waffle guy or something, there’s no reason -.”

“For me to be here?” he finished quickly, darting a look up at her face.

“For you to torture yourself like this,” she corrected, and the fire that had kindled in him ebbed and died. He looked down at his shoes.

“I want to stay,” he mumbled. “Gotta keep an eye on things.”

Natasha sat down in the armchair opposite him and leaned forwards, resting her elbows on her knees.

“Except you _don’t_ ,” she said gently. “You’re an Avenger, and of course we want you here, but you don’t have to stay if you’d rather not. Or,” she added, deciding that the soft-pedal approach was getting her nowhere, “if your emotional volatility is going to compromise this mission.”

He sighed loudly and rolled his eyes. “Come on, Nat,” he said, staring up at the far corner of the ceiling. “I’m not gonna _compromise the mission_ , you know me better than that -.”

“I know that the success of this mission, whether we like it or not, depends on Loki,” she interrupted, cutting him off. “And I know that you just _needlessly antagonized_ him -.”

“I antagonized _him_? _He’s_ the antagonist!” He threw his arms into the air. “He antagonizes _me_ just by – by _existing_!”

“That’s exactly the problem!” He jumped to his feet and began pacing around the room, and she held herself back from following him and forcing him to face her. “I get that it upsets you, but he kind of _has_ to exist if he’s going to help us stop Dr. Foster from causing the end of the world. And – look, I know things got off to a rough start, but I really do believe that he wants to help us.” She softened her voice. “You trust my judgement, don’t you?”

Clint was silent. He stopped in front of the Foosball table in the middle of the room and rolled one of the handles under the palm of his hand. The little plastic players swung back and forth, hypnotically.

“What happened when you went through the portal?” he asked, without looking up.

Natasha sat back in the armchair. Clint had been right to pick the couch, she decided. The chair was too firm to be entirely comfortable, and the grey Naugahyde slipcover felt unpleasantly clammy in the air-conditioned interior of the plane.

“I followed Loki,” she said, omitting to point out that this was a repetition of what she had already told them last night. “The Dark Elves captured us. He helped me escape.”

Clint frowned. Natasha held her breath.

“Why did he have to come _back_?” he burst out, petulantly. “I thought we’d seen the last of him when he went into the stupid stairwell!”

Natasha almost laughed. “I told you. He really does want to help us, now.” Because he wants revenge, and by the way, did you ever hear him mention anything about weird figures in hooded cloaks? she didn’t say. Instead, she added, flippantly: “He wants to rule the world, remember? You can’t do that if someone else _ends_ it.”

“He doesn’t care about ruling the world,” Clint said. His voice was tight. “He just wants to _smash_ it. Just to show he can.” He swung the Foosball players back and forth. “Why do you think he went through the portal?”

Natasha gave a one-shouldered shrug. “To show he could, I guess. Because he wanted to press his advantage, find an edge.” Her irritation with him was beginning to return. What was this supposed to prove? That Loki was a devious bastard? They already _knew_ that. “Maybe because he wanted to make us look stupid. Maybe all of the above!”

Clint yanked his hand back, making the handle spin under his palm. The plastic men whirred, each of them a circular blur of red, and there was a sharp _crack_ as one of them struck the ball, followed by a second _crack_ as it hit the back of the net. “Exactly! Looking for an edge, that’s what he _does_ , that’s how he works! He’s gonna make this about _himself_ somehow, I know it, and if he’s sticking around, then it’s because he thinks he can turn this clusterfuck to his advantage!”

Natasha stared at him. Not for the first time, she felt blindsided by the realization of just how radically different their thought processes were.

“And that’s a _problem_?” she managed to say, but Clint wasn’t listening.

“He’s going to do _something_.” The Foosball table rattled and clanked and spat the ball back out onto the plastic playing field. Clint spun the handle and smacked it back into the net. “Maybe he’s going to kidnap Dr. Foster. I mean, he hates it when his brother has something he doesn’t, so maybe that makes sense. Except I think he’s a little bit afraid of her, so maybe it doesn’t.” Clank, rattle, _crack_. “Or he’s after the Aether. It’s powerful, right? He likes power. There’s no _way_ he’s going to let SHIELD take it, or Asgard. He must want it. Or -.”

“ _Clint_.” She crossed the room and spun him around to face her. “Calm _down_. The Avengers are here; SHIELD is here; and _he doesn’t have his magic_ , remember? If he thinks he can pull one over on us, then he’s got another thought coming. We’re ready for him.”

The muscles in Clint’s arms tensed as his hands curled into fists – but then she felt him relax. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again his expression was beseeching.

“it’s just – it’s _hard_ ,” he said plaintively, and Natasha had to resist the urge to pinch his cheeks. He looked so _young_. “After everything…”

“I know,” she told him, with 100% sincerity. “Really. You don’t have to explain.”

He rubbed at his eyes and dragged his hands down his face. “And now I have to be _nice_ to him? It’s messed up.”

“I _know_ ,” Natasha said, frowning. The spark of irritation she had been feeling had almost died, but now it was being fanned back to life. “You don’t have to tell _me_. Come on. Let’s make some coffee, and then we’ll head back.”

But Clint went on. It was like he couldn’t stop himself. “I mean, have you ever thought you knew who the bad guy is? You could just go, yep, that guy there, he is _bad_. And then, bam, you get hit really hard on the head, and it’s like you wake up in this crazy mirror universe where he’s one of the _good_ guys now, and you’re just supposed to _forget_ about all the shit he -.”

“I. KNOW.”

Clint’s head jerked up. He looked startled and a little scared, but Natasha didn’t care. All sympathy she had felt for him had just gone up in flames. He _never remembered_. Every time, she had to be the one to remind him of what her life had been, as if he hadn’t been there when she’d hit rock bottom.

 _Do you know what it feels like to be unmade?_ He had had the audacity, the absolute _gall_ to ask her that, when he should have _known_ the answer was: yes. Over and over again, _yes_.

“Tell me,” she said, when she could trust herself to speak without shouting. “Do you know how many of the girls I grew up with – girls I considered my _family_ \- were killed by SHIELD agents? _Exactly_?”

Clint’s eyes widened. His throat moved as he swallowed. That was what she had thought.

“Neither does SHIELD,” she told him. “But _I do_.” She turned her back on him and headed for the door. “Just because something is personal doesn’t mean it’s important. Learn to work with Loki, Clint. Or get out.”

//


	28. Chapter 28

In the end, Clint did get out, but only in a manner of speaking.

He didn’t recuse himself from the mission entirely, and after hearing what Natasha had to say was even more committed to keeping Loki where he could see him (and, if necessary, shoot him in the ass), but he did spend the rest of the day away from the Globemaster and the lab, out in the open air. If he had to go back into that factory and look Loki in the eye after what had just happened, he was going to murder him.

So he walked. He didn’t know where he was going, and it didn’t much matter. The area around the factory was filled with blocks of near-identical apartment buildings, but cities had a gravity of their own, and soon Clint found the streets becoming crowded with pedestrians and the roads becoming thick with traffic as he approached the heart of downtown London.

It felt good to give up and lose himself in the press and flow of the crowd. He didn’t fight it. He just – let go.

The crowd felt like a single, living organism one with a pulse and a rhythm all its own. It stretched thin in some places and contracted in others; it propelled him down streets and around corners, and dipped him into a café long enough to buy an overpriced coffee in a paper cup before dragging him back out again. London was a different city from New York. They were both cities of business, whose heartbeats were the rhythm of buying and selling, but London had a solidity, a sense of roots stretching down beneath the pavement, that New York lacked. New York was frenetic, desperate to impress with its skyscrapers, enormous monuments to American cupidity. London build similar monuments, but it looked on them with a jaded eye and thumbed its nose at them. They didn’t matter. They were only the surface of London, the fruiting bodies of a great, sprawling fungus that lived most of its life underground. London was built on London: compared to it, New York was built on sand.

Evidence of its past lives was everywhere. Some of it Clint could guess at, looking up at stone masonry that probably pre-dated the entire state of Iowa, but other parts were illuminated by discreet plaques explaining who had lived where, and what had been excavated and from how long ago. A Roman aqueduct. A Viking torc. A Saxon brooch. Richard the First. The Earl of Sandwich (whom Clint had suspected of being made-up, but there you go, you lived and learned). Charles Dickens. It all felt so close that Clint could imagine scratching modern London away with a fingernail, like it was a lottery ticket, and seeing beneath it the outline of one of those older Londons from long ago.

A lull in the pressure of the crowd cast him up at the base of an enormous white pillar. Clint dodged around the lineup of people waiting to climb up to its observation tower and wandered around its plinth, staring up at the engraved bronze plaques that decorated it. It was, he discovered, a monument to the Great Fire of London; and, looking at it, he felt irrationally proud of the sheer bone-headed resilience of the human race. Their city had been burnt to the ground, men, women and children forced to flee with whatever they could carry – and, when the fire was out and they could come creeping back, what had they done but build what was basically a huge middle finger to commemorate the destruction.

London was London, and people were people, and both had endured.

Clint stepped back so he could stare up it, shading his eyes to better see the copper urn or whatever it was right at the very top. A shadow seemed to pass in front of his eyes. For an instant, the shining urn disappeared. It was snuffed out, like the flame of a candle.

 _Fire they could endure_ , said a voice in his head that wasn’t his own, _but where will they flee when darkness covers the earth, and there is no light for them to see by?_

Clint dropped his hand. It was trembling.

Someone’s shoulder clipped his back, making him stumble. “Asshole!” they yelled at him, and vanished back into the crowd before he could see who it was. Adrift, he scrambled back into a spot of comparative calm next to the pillar where he would be out of the way, watched without curiosity by the people in the line-up.

The sun was set on its inexorable track to the west. Darkness was gathering around the edge of the horizon, preparing to draw its blanket over the landscape.

 _Maybe this time it will be for good,_ said his thoughts. _Maybe_ this _time, the darkness will never recede._ _Eternal night, forever and absolute._

Clint shuddered. That was enough, he told himself firmly. It was time to go home.

//

There were lights on in the security tent as Clint clambered over the plywood barrier and crossed the empty lot on his way to the Globemaster. The Airborne Mobile Command Center was comfortable enough but space on it was limited, and all the living quarters on board had been assigned to the Avengers. The additional security personnel remained on standby outside, monitoring reams of security feeds and communication relays from within a large white plastic pavilion.

A burst of laughter erupted from inside. Clint stopped. He could use a laugh. He ambled over and popped his head inside to see what the fuss was about.

The security team was clustered around a laptop, which stood open on a folding table that held an assortment of other monitors and surveillance equipment. Clint couldn’t help noticing, too, the large dark crate that had been shoved underneath the table, out of the way. So even after what had happened yesterday, SHIELD was determined to hang onto the Phase-Two prototypes.

One of the agents gathered around the laptop looked around and spotted him. He waved him over. “Hey, Hawkeye! Take a look at this!”

Curious, Clint moved closer so that he had a clear view of the screen. A couple of the guys shuffled aside to make room for him.

They were watching a video. The footage was shaky and slightly grainy, and after a moment Clint recognized it as a recording from one of the cameras the Special-Ops guys wore on their flak vests. For a second, all the screen showed was the corner of another agent’s shoulder, and then the camera holder moved to the side and Clint saw Loki.

A bolt of blue light shot across the frame. It hit Loki right in the center of his chest, knocking him off his feet and out of sight.

Clint jumped, startled, as the agents around him _howled_ with laughter.

“Do it again!” An agent leaned forwards and smacked the agent running the laptop on the arm with the back of his hand. “Half-speed. You’ve gotta see the look on his face right before he gets hit.”

“I don’t know,” one of the others said critically. “I still think those guns are missing some _kick_.” He clenched his fist for effect. “A bit of _oomph_. Some chutzpah.”

“Everybody’s a critic.” The agent rolled his eyes. “It sent him through the railing, didn’t it? That’s not nothing.”

The critical one waved his hand dismissively. “That rusted piece of crap? It was held together with string! You could’ve knocked it over just by breathing heavily on it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” The laptop’s owner paused the video, which had looped and started again, and pointed at the screen. “The railing doesn’t break where the string is, it _bends_. Look! See that?”

“So?”

“So that takes a helluva lot of force, is what I’m saying. That shot had plenty of kick behind it.”

They all watched the video again. The critic pursed his lips.

“I dunno,” he said. “If it was _really_ powerful, it would’ve sent him flying right across that stairwell and into the opposite wall.”

“Complain to the R&D team, then, don't give _me_ shit about it.” Laptop Guy shook his head, disgusted. “Christ, there’s no pleasing you, is there?”

“Hey, can you make one of those gif things out of that?” asked the agent who had beckoned Clint over.

“It’s pronounced _jiff_ ,” the critic said, thereby earning himself a top spot on the list of people whom Clint thought also deserved to be shot.

“I wanna send it to Ripley. I think it’d cheer her up.”

“Sure thing.” Laptop Guy hit a few keys and opened a new window. “She still in the hospital?”

“In and out. It’s her lungs, this time. Dust inhalation. She got stuck under the rubble in New Mexico,” he explained to Clint. “Took us almost a whole day to find her, and she was one of the lucky ones. Still doesn’t know if she can go back into the field again.”

“Sorry,” Clint said awkwardly.

The agent squeezed his shoulder. “Not your fault. Not your fault at all. I mean, _magic_ , man. What’re you gonna do against _that?_ ”

“Yeah,” the critic said. “Don’t worry. We all know _exactly_ who was responsible for what went down.”

Laptop Guy looked back over his shoulder at him. “You want a copy of this too? Tell you what, I’ll cc’ you on it.”

//

Clint crept back on-board the Globemaster feeling… conflicted.

He appreciated their friendliness. He really did. It meant a lot to him, knowing that the rank-and-file of SHIELD had his back. That the agents who weren’t part of the Avengers, who did the day-to-day grunt work involved in running a shadowy, heavily-armed intelligence agency (Darcy was rubbing off on him) didn’t blame him for the literal and figurative scarring of their coworkers. And he understood where they were coming from. There was an undercurrent of fear to their laughter. When it came down to it, all any of them really were, were men and women with some really big guns – and now they were being called on to face magic spells. Space-weapons. Super-powered beings, benign and otherwise. They hadn’t been trained for this, and they were afraid. If one of the ways they chose to de-stress was by passing around gifs of the guy who had attacked them, who was he to judge? They were only human, after all.

And yet, as he climbed the ramp into the Globemaster, there was a little worm of discomfort wriggling, maggot-like, inside his chest.

It didn’t help that, when he went to the kitchenette to grab something to eat, he almost walked straight into an argument between Steve and Agent Sitwell.

“Are you _charging_ me with something?” he heard Steve say, and Clint immediately pivoted on his heel and fast-walked back down the hall.

But you couldn’t hang out with a bunch of spies all day without developing a flexible understanding of 'personal privacy'. Clint stopped while he was still within earshot and listened hard, pressing himself against the wall.

Sitwell’s voice was very patient. “No. Of course not. That’s not necessary. This is just an… informal warning.”

“But I didn’t _do_ anything! It was an accident!”

“Of _course_ it was,” Sitwell said, after a pause that went on for just a fraction of a second too long. Clint winced. “No one is saying that it wasn’t.”

“You just -.”

“Look,” Sitwell cut in. “This is protocol. I am required, by SHIELD’s charter and the requirements regarding the treatment of captured enemy combatants imposed on us by the World Security Council, to remind you that Loki is technically our prisoner. I am obliged to tell you that any further ‘accidents’,” – the quotation marks fell into place like tombstones, “- will be investigated by an external oversight committee. Alright? Alright. Good talk.” Clint could picture Sitwell straightening his tie – a kind of visual punctuation mark. “Unofficially?” His voice relaxed into a friendlier, more natural tone. “Nice shot, Cap. Maybe aim a little lower next time, eh?” There was a sound as though he had smacked Steve on the arm. “Have a good night now.”

Clint darted around the corner and waited until Sitwell had gone past before he sauntered back towards the kitchenette, doing his best nonchalant stroll.

He stopped in the doorway. Steve, even without the uniform or the shield, filled the room almost to capacity. Clint wasn’t sure he could reach the cupboards without accidentally touching Captain America’s butt, and from the look on his face, Steve had enough to deal with at the moment.

“Uh,” he said. “Everything alright, Cap?”

He was dressed in his civilian clothes, or, as Clint liked to think of it, the your-grandpa-but-hotter look, with a blue button-up shirt and pressed khakis. A small frown wrinkled the skin between his eyes, and he was opening and closing the cupboard doors apparently at random.

“I didn’t,” he said suddenly. He still had his hand on the handle of the last cupboard he had opened, and he was staring at its contents without appearing to see them. “I didn’t hit him on purpose.”

“Okay,” said Clint, resisting his first, knee-jerk response, which was: why not?

Steve rounded on him. “Everyone _else_ thinks I did,” he said accusingly.

A familiar red box caught Clint’s eye from within the open cupboard. He inched around Steve and stretched out his hand to grab it. “What, you mean Sitwell?” he asked, before remembering, oh right – _he_ hadn’t been eavesdropping, no siree, not him. Oh well, too late to cover it up now. He might as well go for broke. “Don’t sweat it. He has to say that stuff, but he’s not gonna get you in trouble. I mean, you’re _Captain America_. Everyone knows Captain America doesn’t rough up prisoners.”

He snagged the box of Lucky Charms by the tips of his fingers and turned, rejoicing, towards the door – which brought him face-to-face with Steve.

“Uh,” Clint said, when he remembered how to speak. He mentally replayed his last few sentences, and flinched. “What I _meant_ was –.”

“I didn’t,” Steve said quickly, but then his face crumpled into a complicated landscape that Clint didn’t have a map to. “I _wanted_ to. Sometimes. A couple of times. After…”

It was a significant ellipse. The historians at the Smithsonian could have filled entire information panels in their Captain America exhibit with that ellipse. Clint clutched the box of cereal between them like a wholly inadequate shield. Trying to cover his confusion, he ripped the top off and plunged his hand inside.

“I was just – so _angry_.” Steve stared into the middle distance – lost in an inner vision of his best friend plummeting to his death probably, shit, shit, where was one of those SHIELD psych pamphlets when you needed one?! “But I don’t feel like that now.” He furrowed his brow. “I don’t think I do, anyways.”

“Mm,” Clint said, eloquently. He shoved the box at Steve. “Lucky Charm?”

Steve’s expression was shading into anger as he reached in and took a handful. “SHIELD gave Zola a job, too,” he said, his voice hard. “Is that always how it is? The bad guys get to be _useful_ , and the good guys get - what? A headstone in Arlington and an empty grave?”

“I mean… sometimes, I guess?” Clint felt very unqualified for this conversation. “I feel like… SHIELD looks at the big picture, you know? Like, you can have them on the outside pissing in, or on the inside pissing out. Figuratively speaking,” he added, in case that hadn’t been a common idiom in The Past.

“I get it, thanks.” Steve was frowning at his handful of cereal like it had personally disappointed him, which was unfair, because he hadn’t even tasted it yet. “… Did you ever hear about a guy called Werner Von Braun?”

The next time he had a one-on-one conversation with Steve, Clint vowed, it would be somewhere where he could google stuff like this on his phone under the table.

“He built V2 rockets in Germany during the war,” Steve said. He picked up a miniature rainbow-shaped marshmallow between his thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that. “He used slave labour. And then after Germany surrendered, we hired him to help build the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He dropped the marshmallow back into the palm of his hand. “Inside pissing out, huh?”

“Just about,” Clint agreed.

Steve made a face, and popped the handful of cereal into his mouth. Then he made a different face, and immediately spat it out. “ _God_ \- ! How much sugar is _in_ that?!”

Clint, his jaws working around a double-fistful of dehydrated mini-marshmallows, shrugged. “I like it with chocolate milk, personally,” he offered, after he had swallowed. “Nat thinks it’s gross, but I’ve seen her pour chocolate syrup on top of Cocoa Puffs, so she can’t talk.”

Steve shook his head as he wiped the palm of his hand on his khakis. “You two are…”

Clint was already nodding glumly. He had heard it all before. The possible endings to that sentence ran the gamut from “really weird” to “deeply fucked up” and, most hurtful of all, “no longer welcome in the SHIELD commissary,” which he personally considered to have been a complete overreaction. There hadn’t even been that much blood, no matter what the janitorial staff said. But Steve surprised him.

“… really good together, you know that?” He clapped Clint on the shoulder with his clean hand. “Hold on to that.”

“Uh.” Clint suddenly felt guilty, like he’d been caught purposely flaunting his complicated interpersonal relationships in front of a man who’d woken up to find that everyone he had ever loved was dead or dying. “Yeah. I mean, I will.”

He jumped, startled, as his phone vibrated in his pocket at the same time as Steve’s khakis beeped. Grateful for the distraction, Clint swiped his thumb across the screen as Steve dropped his hand from Clint’s shoulder and pulled out his own phone. It was a message from an unfamiliar name, with a file attached to it.

It took a fraction of a second for Clint to put two and two together, and by that time it was too late to stop Steve from tapping the screen and opening the attachment.

Silently, Clint called down curses on the head of the administrator in charge of updating the SHIELD directory. May they always find someone else in their assigned parking spot. May the coffee pot in their break room always be empty. May they continually find themselves sharing a table with members of the psych department in the cafeteria, and be forced to answer uncomfortably earnest questions about their mental health over lunch. Because the security team had not just delivered on their promise to cc’ Clint on the Loki .gif: they had gone a step further, and looked up Steve’s phone number as well.

Clint listened, in acutest agony, as the sound of Loki getting shot with the Phase-Two Prototype filled the kitchenette, again and again, while Steve’s expression grew dark.

The file name was GodofGettingPwned.gif. The modern generation had been a mistake.

“You have to… Just tap it, if you wanna stop it,” he said, as the .gif looped on Steve’s phone and began to play again – the blast of the gun, the crash, and the first syllable of Thor shouting his brother’s name. “Hit the screen, and it’ll stop. Just -”

“I’ve got it, thanks,” Steve said, and hit the power button hard enough to shut the phone off all together. There was a far-away look in his eyes. “Thanks for the talk.” He eyed the cereal box in Clint’s hands doubtfully. “And… whatever that was, I guess. Do you know where I could find Director Fury? I think,” he added, grimly, “we need to talk.”

//


	29. Chapter 29

Natasha woke up the next morning feeling… not _hopeful_ , exactly, but _reasonably in control of events_. There had been moments where she had felt herself lose her grip along the way, but those were in the past. After their Space Adventures on Asgard, followed by the Other, Worse Space Adventures on Svartalfheim (though those could probably be upgraded to Hijinks, or even Shenanigans), things were back on a track that she could relate to. She was the handler; Loki was her agent. Even if she couldn’t control him, she was now confident that she could at least point him in the right direction before he slipped his leash and went for someone’s throat.

Even yesterday’s argument with Clint couldn’t dim her mood entirely, though she felt guilty when she thought about it. She considered saying something to him, but he was still fast asleep in the top bunk of the room they shared. She would make him coffee instead, she decided. Coffee was like an apology that came in a cup. Wasn’t it?

The kitchenette was already occupied by a tousle-haired Stark, who was leaning against the counter and sipping a cup of coffee as he stared at the screen of his tablet. He shuffled aside so that she could get a couple of mugs.

“Morning, Tony.” Natasha looked down at his tablet’s screen as she leaned past him. It was playing a cartoon about a girl and a small mouse, in Japanese. There were no subtitles.

“Xәйерле ирте, Natalia,” he said, and Natasha punched him in the face.

//

Among its many amenities, the Globemaster came equipped with a fully-stocked, modern and up-to-date medical bay with everything a team might reasonably require, including large amounts of very absorbent paper towels. SHIELD knew their agents.

“I can't believe you hnf _struck_ me!” Stark yelled. Blood dripped from his nose in great big burgundy droplets that _plunk_ ed as they hit the bottom of the metal sink sunk into the counter.

“You’re lucky I didn’t _stab_ you!” Natasha hissed, pacing back and forth. “What the _hell_ was that?!”

“What was it? What _was_ it?!” Stark made a move as if to straighten up, but Thor clamped one massive hand onto the back of his neck and forced his head back down. “A simple greeting is what it was! A ‘good morning’ between teammates – I’m not going to say _friends_ -.”

“Yes, fine, _alright_ ,” Natasha grumbled. She rubbed the knuckles of her right hand. “You startled me.”

“I startled _you_?” Stark’s hands scrabbled at the edges of the sink as Thor, still holding him by the neck, prevented him from rising. “I _startled_ you?!!”

“Lady Natasha, I apologize,” Thor said. “Of course you ought to have been forewarned. The matter was discussed between the Man of Iron and myself last night -.”

“… hope no one’s ever tried the old electric-buzzer handshake on you, that’s all I can say,” Stark muttered, still face-down in the sink. “ _‘Startled’_ my -.”

“Language continued to be a problem, as Loki refuses to use Midgardian script. The Man of Iron felt, and I agreed, that it was unwise to leave him with the ability to keep secrets from us -.”

“You lose nuance in the translation,” Loki insisted. No one had summoned him to the medical bay - he had just turned up, like a nursing home cat with a knack for anticipating a death. He pulled the lid off of one of the jars on the counter and poked at the cotton swabs inside.

“ _Fortunately_ ,” Thor said, glaring at him, “the Man of Iron had brought a flask of water from the Well of Wisdom back from Asgard. He sought my permission to drink it and thereby obtain the All-Speak, which would grant him mastery of all languages -.”

“It will end in tears, mark my words,” Loki said. He picked up a container filled with tongue depressors and shook it, holding it up to his ear. “Literal _floods_ of tears. Not to mention fire – pestilence – famine – war -.”

“ _And I agreed_ , seeing that it would be an advantage to us. Loki, put those down.”

It took a minute for the implications to sink in, and when they did, Natasha rounded on Stark. “You _stole_ -!”

He held up a hand to forestall her. “I _sampled_. It isn’t stealing if it’s for _science_. Eir showed me the fountain they keep the water in when we were on Asgard. And, what do you know, it was _just_ water!” He hocked a bloody loogie into the sink. “I owe Eir a hundred bucks. Do they have Paypal on Asgard?”

“Thor, I am _so_ sorry,” Natasha said. “He never should have done that – if I had known -.”

“It’s too late for apologies now. All we can do is await the inevitable, grisly consequences," Loki said, with relish.

“Give it a rest,” Stark grumbled. He rolled his eyes. “Can you believe he’s been like this all night?”

“Actually, I can," Natasha said grimly.

It didn’t take a God of Mischief, after all, to understand that the best way of making Tony Stark do something was to tell him that he shouldn’t, or couldn’t, do it. If Stark had ever harboured any doubts as to the wisdom of his plan, Loki’s dire warnings would have blotted them out entirely. He would have chugged that water with gusto, keeping eye contact with Loki the entire time.

But to what end? Having another Avenger who was capable of understanding him only made Loki’s plans more transparent. He _lost_ power by it, he didn’t gain it. Or was there something she was missing?

“No apologies are necessary,” Thor assured her. “The Man of Iron is more than worthy of the honour. I was proud to grant his request.”

“Thanks, Point Break. You can let me up now, the bleeding’s stopped.” Thor let go of his neck, and Stark grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser above the counter. “And, hey, sorry for setting off your superspy tragic-backstory alarm bells and everything but, to be fair, anyone could look up a couple of words of Russian on Wikilanguages, you probably wanna reel those reflexes in before someone gets killed.”

“That wasn’t _Russian,_ you - _!_ ” Natasha stopped, and forced herself to draw in a deep breath. “Never mind.”

“Really?” Stark scrunched up his face, puzzled. “I thought it would be Russian. I guess there’s more to this All-Speak than I thought.”

Natasha saw Loki’s eyebrows shoot up – but before he could say anything, the glass doors to the med bay slid open. Clint skidded to a stop on the other side of them, his bow in one hand and his quiver in the other. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath, and since he wasn’t wearing a shirt, he became the immediate focus of everyone’s attention.

His eyes darted around to each of them. “I thought…” He sucked in another deep breath. Loki’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “I heard… yelling?”

“Everything’s fine,” Natasha assured him. He wasn’t wearing shoes either, she noticed. He must have been woken up by the commotion. “It’s all sorted out now.” She moved over so that she was standing between him and Loki. It probably wasn’t a good idea to have the two of them in the same room. She cast about for some excuse to separate them. “Could you find Steve for me? There are a few things I need to discuss with him.”

Clint blinked. He looked surprised, and then a cloud seemed to pass over his expression. “Steve’s gone.”

“Gone?” Stark’s head jerked up from where he’d been trying to comb the blood out of his goatee. “What, like Gone Girl gone?”

“I mean, he’s gone.” Clint shifted awkwardly on his bare feet. “He told Fury he needed some time off to think about things. Said he’d be back if we need him, but he doesn’t have the right skills for this mission. He left for Washington last night.”

Natasha barely heard him, or Thor and Stark's flood of questions. Her thoughts were buzzing. Steve was gone. He hadn’t said anything to her about it, or made any kind of an effort to talk it out – he had just _left_. She thought back to when she had last seen him. He hadn’t been upset then, so what had he been thinking? What could have happened to him in the time between then and now to make him _leave?_

As if she was a compass needle and he was magnetic north, her head swung around towards Loki. He was standing with his back to the rest of them, ostensibly uninterested in what was going on – but he was facing the glass-fronted cabinets, in which he could watch the reflection of everything that was happening in the room.

He didn’t look surprised by any of this, she realized. But he didn’t look pleased, either. He didn’t look anything.

Maybe Steve hadn’t been upset by anything that had happened yesterday. Maybe it was something that had happened earlier…

Natasha was aware that she was being watched. She could feel the weight of Clint’s eyes on her, and Loki’s. She considered her words carefully before she spoke.

“That’s… good,” she said.

In the glass, Loki’s reflection moved as though he had been about to turn to face her, and had thought better of it.

“I’m happy for him,” she said and, apart from resenting his piss-poor sense of timing, she genuinely meant it. Steve worked hard. He deserved some time off. Just – did it have to be _now_? “I think this could be good for him.”

Thor and Stark exchanged a look. “Really?” Stark said. “You don’t think we’re maybe going to be a little short-handed?”

“No,” Natasha said firmly. “It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to Sitwell about reorganizing the rota for the security staff.”

She looked up and met Clint’s eyes. He stared back, unsmiling. His face was a mask.

“Everything is going to be fine,” she said, and knew he didn’t believe her.

She didn’t blame him in the least.

//

 


	30. Chapter 30

Whether or not Steve’s leave of absence would be good for his mental health remained to be seen. More immediately, and although she would never admit it to anyone (especially not to Clint), his departure left Natasha stretched thinner than ever, and even more overworked.

The problem was the rota. Whether because he was magic or because he was… something else, Loki’s sleep patterns and circadian rhythms stretched a lot farther than Midgard’s puny 24-hour days. On the one hand, this meant that he could, and did, work through the night. On the other, not even Natasha would have considered leaving him in the lab unsupervised, with unfettered access to Dr. Foster’s machines. Someone had to stay up with him.

Thor was similarly impervious to sleep, and on the face of it he seemed like a natural fit. However, no matter what the biological facts of the case were, he and Loki were brothers though and through. When they were together, they fought _constantly_ : bickering, sniping arguments that dragged them back and forth across the sharp terrain of their shared past, and left them both worn-out and sulky. After a particularly vicious fight ended with a Mjolnir-shaped hole in one of the factory walls, Natasha did her best to make sure they were left alone together as little as possible.

Darcy made a good buffer. She was up-beat, took no shit, and had a knack for de-escalating situations when the atmosphere in the lab got too tense. She was, moreover, the only other person who understood and properly applied Natasha’s system for redirecting Loki’s attention with iced coffee and ice cream bars when he began to get fractious.

(“My parents foster rescue dogs,” she explained. “Redirection and positive reinforcement, I got this.”)

But Darcy was only human. Natasha made a point of scheduling breaks for her and blocking out periods of time when she could get some sleep, and she rarely needed to be reminded to use them. Clint would supervise the lab if he was asked to, but his silent, glowering presence, usually perched on top of one of the filing cabinets, contributed very little to a productive workplace environment.  Natasha tried to keep him on the outside surveillance team, as far from Loki as possible. And as for Stark…

“He’s playing us,” Stark insisted, wild-eyed and apparently on the verge of a caffeine overdose. “It’s a double-cross, or maybe a triple-cross. I don’t know how you’re supposed to count them, you’d know better than me.”

“Tony…” He had followed her into the bathroom onboard the Globemaster, which, while not an _egregious_ violation of privacy (there were stalls, it was fine), was annoying enough that Natasha found it difficult to feel much sympathy towards him. “Do you have proof? Is he lying about the work?”

She could see his scuffed sneakers moving back and forth across the space under the stall door. “No, no, he’s too smart for that. See, _he_ knows that _we_ know he’s the God of Lies, so he’s got to get at us by telling the _truth_. Q.E.D.”

Natasha rested her elbows on her knees and covered her face with her hands. “That’s… really _profound_ , Tony. Good job.”

“No, that part’s fine.” His shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor. “See, we know we need to find another phase-space distortion that’ll take us to Svartalfheim. The Convergence isn’t a steady process, it happens in _pulses_ , as if there has to be this build-up of force before the realms can move past each other. It’s like there’s some kind of friction holding them back, except it can’t be like that, since movement in phase-space is, by its nature, friction-less, as it takes place -.”

Natasha let the wave of scientific jargon was over and under her, floating her away on a sea of incomprehensibility. Maybe it was time to look for another job. An easier one. The CIA might be willing to take a chance on her. Then again, she wanted to cross out the red in her ledger, not add to it.

“… it’s predictable,” Stark said, and she forced herself to pay attention. “So we’re on track to find out _where_ to go. It’s the _how_ that’s the problem.”

“Why?” Natasha demanded, alert. “What’s happened?”

Stark’s shoes stopped in front of the stall door. “It’s not working,” he said at last. “Dr. Foster’s equipment, I mean. And it’s not _going_ to work, not at the rate we’re going. It’s like – he keeps asking for things. Tools, and equipment, and god, I don’t even know what.”

“So get them. Or I’ll get them.” The toilet paper SHIELD provided was only two-ply. Would three-ply improve everyone’s tempers enough that she could get a whole thirty seconds to herself in this place? It was worth a try.

“That’s the thing, it’s all stuff that doesn’t _exist_! Or, I mean, _I’ve_ never heard of it. It doesn’t exist here, is the point. And he keeps saying it’s essential, and it does this, and it does that, and – what if he’s doing it on purpose? What if he’s making us waste our time looking for the Asgardian equivalent of a bag of nail-holes while Malekith and his army get ready to invade and walk all over us before we even realize they’re here?”

It was a reasonable concern. The weak point of the mission was Loki. They relied too much on him and his knowledge and expertise. Parts of it were shared by Thor, and Tony, and Darcy, but only in Loki’s mind were all the strands connected. If he really wanted to screw them over, all he had to do was manufacture delays: Dr. Foster would release the Aether, the Convergence would move the realms into alignment, and Malekith would get his wish for eternal darkness.

And yet, Natasha didn’t believe that Loki would sabotage them. She didn’t think his pride would let him. Even if he wanted to see them fail (and, after what she had witnessed on Svartalfheim, she didn’t think he did), he would never let it be because he appeared to _not know something_. He would twist the situation around, make the mission founder because of _their_ incompetence, but _his_ part in it would go perfectly.

The strongest evidence that Loki _was_ acting in good faith, therefore, was the fact that things really _were_ going poorly. Natasha was aware that this was less than ideal.

“Loki wants to get back to Svartalfheim just as much as the rest of us do,” she said, pushing open the stall door and going to wash her hands. “You concentrate on repairing Dr. Foster’s equipment. I’ll handle Loki. Okay?”

She turned to face him. Stark’s brow was drawn into lines of confusion as he looked from her to the bathroom stall and back again.

“… Were you peeing in there?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “It’s a _bathroom_. What did you think I was doing, powdering my nose?” And then she looked more closely, and did a double-take. “Tony, what the hell?! You look like a raccoon!”

Instinctively she stepped forwards to take a closer look, and he jerked backwards, knocking into the trashcan.

“Sorry,” he said, automatically. “I just – instinct. You startled me,” and Natasha remembered that, right, sudden movements on her part were a bad idea, under the circumstances.

“But what – how did – did _I_ -?” It gradually dawned on her, through the miasma of guilt, that what she had at first taken for two black eyes were actually nothing worse than very deep shadows – which, though _bad_ , wasn’t nearly as awful as what she had first imagined. She stepped closer, careful to move slowly. Tony’s pupils were pin-pricks under the fluorescent lights. “… Are you sleeping okay?”

He refocused his eyes and frowned at her. “Sleep is for the weak.”

“Which is _you_ , right now.” She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “There’s a _schedule_ , Tony. I _told_ you to go to bed.”

“It’s fine. I’ll get some coffee and then I’ll be good to go. Seriously, I’ve pulled plenty of all-nighters. I went to M.I.T., remember?”

“Sure, when you were _twelve_. You’re an old man, Tony, you’re going to be useless if you try to keep this up. Get some _sleep_ ,” Natasha insisted, as she pushed open the bathroom door. “Or I’ll tranq you. _Again_.”

//

Unfortunately for everyone, Tony did not get some sleep. Instead, he went back to the lab, which Natasha only realized when she heard the shouting.

Something in the factory was on fire. There were no visible flames, but the interior of the building was completely obscured by thick black smoke. In the first few paralysing seconds Natasha stood in the entrance to the security tent, still gripping the plastic flap in one hand, and watched their work – their _world-saving_ work – go up in flames.

And then her training kicked in and she grabbed the nearest agent.

“Get onto the nearest cel towers,” she ordered. “Intercept all the relevant calls to 9-1-1 before the fire trucks get here. The last thing we need is a bunch of fire fighters storming in here.”

The agent nodded and darted back inside the tent. Natasha heard him rapping out orders as she pulled her collar up to cover her nose and mouth, and prepared to run into the building. It was lucky that it was night – or, technically, very early in the morning. There wouldn’t be too many people up and looking around, and it would be hard to see the smoke against the night sky.

Of course, the darkness meant that _she_ couldn’t see very well either.

The inside of the building was a maze of concrete walls and plastic sheeting. She had memorized the layout, of course (she wasn’t an _amateur_ ), but things were being moved in and out of the makeshift lab space all the time: boxes and folding tables and second-hand chairs, and garbage bags full of all the rubbish that was being swept up. Natasha narrowly missed stubbing her toe on a stack of loose bricks that hadn’t been there yesterday, and then literally ran straight into Darcy.

“Oh, thank god!” Darcy grabbed blindly at her through the smoke. “I can’t see shit! Where’s the fire extinguisher?!”

“This way,” Natasha told her and, holding her tightly by the hand, dragged her along with her. “Or it _should_ be.”

It was. And, against all expectations (because it was turning out to be that kind of a mission), it worked. The fire was barely visible, the flame flickering stubbornly under a plume of what was probably some extremely carcinogenic smoke; and Natasha pulled the pin and smothered it under a thick layer of fire-retardant foam.

When she was satisfied that the fire was out, she dropped the canister onto the floor, and activated her comm.

“It’s taken care of,” she said, and had to stop to cough. As her adrenalin ebbed, she realized that she was desperately short of breath. “Emergency services?”

“SHIELD intercepted all calls,” Fury told her, on the other end of the line. “If any trucks or rubber-neckers show up, we’ll deal with them. Over and out.”

There was a click in her ear as he switched off his comm. Natasha was left standing in front of a scorched lab bench, up to her knees in fire-retardant foam, in a room that was still full of a stubborn haze of smoke.

“‘Great job’,” she muttered to herself, sotto-voice. “‘Really quick-thinking, there.’ Oh, thanks, it was nothing, all in a day’s work…” She sighed, and blew a clump of foam off the tip of her nose.

“Hey, _I’m_ plenty appreciative, believe me,” Darcy said. She was bent double as she fought to catch her breath. “Aaah, I’ve got a stitch in my side. This mission _sucks_. I was just about to get into bed, too.”

“I noticed,” Natasha said. “Nice PJs.”

“Thanks.” Darcy cast a proud eye over her sleepwear. She was dressed in a red flannel sleep set, decorated with a pattern of mountain goats. “Thor helped me pick it out. He likes goats,” she added, unnecessarily. She looked sideways at Natasha. “You weren’t sleeping too, were you?”

“Me? Oh.” Natasha looked down at her own black catsuit, now grey with foam and ash. “No, I was up.”

“I was gonna say, that doesn’t look like it breathes at _all_.”

“It’s actually not as bad as you’d think -.”

“What in Bor’s name happened here?!”

Loki’s silhouette appeared framed in the doorway. He looked around the stuffy, stinking room with disgust, holding one hand in front of his face to ward off the smoke.

“Where the hell have you been?” Natasha demanded. “You said you were going to keep working!”

“Thor was hungry,” he said defensively. “And he made me go with him, because of your _idiotic rota_ -.”

“I _know_ you hate the stupid rota, you don’t have to go _on_ about it -.”

“ – so if you’re trying to say this is _my_ fault you’ve got another thought coming, because _I_ had to spend the past quarter of an hour of watching him stuff sweet-and-sour spareribs into his mouth like an _animal_ -.”

The foam that covered the lab bench was beginning to break down into a fine dust. Darcy brushed some of it aside, and gave a cry of dismay.

“The photofluxometer!” She went to pick up the twisted hunk of burnt plastic and metal, and yanked her burnt fingertips back with a hiss. “I _told_ you guys it would overheat if it was left plugged in!”

“I never touched the wretched thing!”

“If you didn’t, then who did? I don’t see anyone _else_ around here, do you?” Darcy demanded, and then yelped as Natasha abruptly gave her a hard shove. She was knocked to the ground, a fraction of a second before Loki tackled Natasha, and the blue beam of a repulsor blast cut through the space where they had been standing a moment before.

A clanking, staggering figure came looming out of the smoke. Loki cursed, and Natasha saw him feeling around frantically for something, _anything_ to use as a weapon –

“Stay _down_ ,” she ordered. “Stick with Darcy, don’t do anything stupid.”

She moved off before he could answer back, crouching low to the ground as she circled around the lab bench, keeping it between herself and the vague shape of Iron Man in the center of the lab.

“Don’t shoot, Tony!” she called, and hoped he wasn’t still mad about the whole Natalie Rushman thing. “It’s me!”

“Black Widow?” The glowing eye slits in the visor turned towards her. “Get out of the way! _He’s here!_ ”

It took a minute for Natasha to catch on. “You mean _Loki_? Tony, he’s _supposed_ to be here!”

The suit’s joints whirred as it stepped forwards. “I told you! He’s sabotaging us!” She couldn’t tell if he was trying to whisper, or if it was just the distortion from the Iron Man speakers. “He _wants_ us to be invaded – overrun -.” His arm was still raised. The repulsor glove glowed, ready to fire.

“We _talked_ about this, Tony.” She risked stepping closer. “The fire was an accident. It’s no one’s fault. We’ll move everything we can still use into a new workspace, and we’ll be ready to start again in the morning. Okay?” she said, and held her breath.

Slowly – very slowly – Iron Man lowered his arm. The blue light in the center of his palm went out. Natasha breathed a sigh of relief as the visor slid back.

The suit was empty.

“That's curious,” Loki said. He picked himself up off the floor and leaned forwards over the lab bench so he could get a closer look at the Iron Man suit. “He’s shorter than I realized.”

"Oh," Natasha said. "Oh, _no_ ," and then Stark came charging out of the smoke and swung a wrench at the back of Loki's unprotected head.

Whether because he had been put on guard by Natasha's exclamation, or because he had been alerted by some sixth sense, Loki reacted in time to dodge the worst of the blow, catching the wrench on his shoulder instead of with his skull. A hiss of pain escaped him, and as Stark moved in for a second swing, Loki’s hand shot out, grabbing him around the throat and lifting him off his feet. Stark kicked and clawed as Loki twisted the wrench out of his grip with his free hand and threw it across the lab. It skittered across the floor and disappeared into the smoke as Loki drew back his arm –

“ _Don’t kill him!”_ Natasha yelled, and Loki faltered. His hesitation gave Stark an opening, and he drove the point of his elbow into Loki’s arm, breaking his grip.

“Don’t worry,” Stark panted, scrambling out of reach. He held up his hand and the motors in the Iron Man suit whirred as it mirrored his motion, aiming the repulsor glove at Loki’s head. “Just gonna… just gonna slow him down a little -.”

Backed up against the lab bench, with Stark in front of him and the Iron Man suit behind him, there was nowhere for Loki to go. Natasha saw his eyes grow wide. Blue light illuminated his face.

"Stark, _no!_ "

Astonishingly, it seemed to work. Stark stopped short, and Natasha experienced a brief moment of hope. She could talk to him, she could explain, she could _fix this_ , and everything would be fine -

And then Stark's eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he went limp. His body slithered to the floor, revealing Darcy standing behind him, clutching her taser in both hands. 

“I. DON’T. LIKE. BEING. FREAKED. OUT!!” she yelled.

Natasha looked down at Tony. He was stretched out in the remains of the fire-retardant foam like someone who had set out to make a snow angel but had succumbed to hypothermia half-way through.

“Oh dear,” Loki said. “Is he dead?”

//


	31. Chapter 31

Out of all the SHIELD agents who had been briefed on the mission to find Jane Foster, the one with the most medical training turned out to be the English half of the Science Wonder Kids duo that had begun the investigation into the portal. SHIELD roused her from wherever she had been spending the night, and before the fingers of the dawn had finished painting the eastern half of the sky in rosy hues she was installed in the medical bay on board the Globemaster with a fractious and only semi-coherent Tony Stark as her patient.

“Mr. Stark, you need to lie down.”

Eyes sparking, Stark clawed back the covers on his hospital bed like a stubborn turtle that had been flipped onto its back and was determined to right itself. The shadows under his eyes made his face look skeletal. “ _No_.”

“You _need to sleep_ ,” Simmons insisted. She laid a restraining hand on his shoulder, which he shrugged off. “That’s an order, Iron Man.”

“Don’ wanna.”

He swung his legs out of the bed, jerky and unsteady, and tried to stand up. Natasha caught him with a hand in the center of his chest, and pushed him back down.

“Tony, you are bare-assed and dressed only in a paper gown,” she said. “I don’t want to make Clint physically subdue you, but so help me I will if I have to.”

Clint looked less than thrilled by the prospect.

Seeing Stark like this, slow and uncoordinated and fuzzy-brained from the combined effects of sleep-deprivation and several hundred volts of electricity, forced Natasha to realize how _old_ he was. For the first time, she noticed the grey hairs at his temples, and the lines on his face. She wondered how long he could continue as Iron Man – if he would just keep building suits to take up the slack from his flesh and blood body, until the armour was a life-supporting husk around a geriatric and senile kernel. It was a disturbing thought.

The kernel looked at them all with black and cunning eyes. “Don’ need sleep,” he insisted. “Don’ want it.”

“Medical science says otherwise, Mr. Stark,” Simmons insisted. She looked pleadingly at Clint and Natasha. “I’m sorry, but this _really_ isn’t my area of expertise. Couldn’t Dr. Banner take over? He is a medical doctor, after all, and he’s Mr. Stark’s friend.”

“Dr. Banner is… away,” Natasha said. All the way in Tierra del Fuego by now, and probably prepared to jump in the ocean and swim to Antarctica at the first hint that SHIELD was catching up to him. “Isn’t there something you could give him to make him sleep? I think,” she added, carefully, “he’s been having bad dreams.”

And this wouldn’t be the first time that one of SHIELD’s agents was desperate enough to do _anything_ to outrun sleep…

“I _could_ , but it’s really very risky.” Simmons wrung her hands together. “Fitz and I have been working on a machine that uses electromagnetic waves to induce REM sleep, but it’s in the very early stages, just a prototype, really, and anyways, it would only be treating the immediate _symptoms_ , without doing anything to solve the underlying _cause_. I need to know more if I’m to do anything, and Mr. Stark is _not_ being very cooperative.” She glared at her patient with all the menace of an irate cocker spaniel.

Stark plucked erratically at the sheets. “Wasn’t a dream,” he mumbled.

"Then what w _as_ it, Tony?" Natasha demanded. "I talked to Pepper, she says you haven't been sleeping well for a while now. So what is it?" He wouldn't meet her eyes, and she moved around the bed so that he was facing her. "Tony." She softened her voice. "We can help you. But you have to _let us_."

His eyes flickered sideways to where Simmons was filling out his chart on her tablet, and Natasha shook her head a fraction.

"I don't mean SHIELD, I mean _us_. The Avengers. We're your team, Tony. We _want_ to help you. But you have to tell us what's wrong."

Stark looked down. The sheets covering his legs were covered in black, sooty fingerprints. He took a deep breath, and for a second Natasha thought she had him, that they could fix this, that they had a chance - but before he could speak, the automatic glass door to the medical bay slid open with a _woosh._

Every single machine at Stark’s bedside immediately leapt into life. Buzzers sounded, lights flashed, alarms beeped, and the line of the electro-cardiogram leapt and plunged like a rodeo horse. Natasha's first, furious thought was  _what idiot let_ Loki  _in here?!_ – but it wasn't him. It was Thor.

“Man of Iron,” he began, but that was as far as he got before Stark lunged out of his bed and tried to grab him by the throat.

“You _bastard_!” he yelled, clawing wildly at the air as both Natasha and Clint held him back. “You _fucking_ bastard!! _Why didn’t you tell us they could talk?!_ "

Thor looked shocked, but his reply was respectful. “I did not think it required saying,” he said . “Nor would the knowledge have assisted you in your task.”

“That wasn’t your call to make!” Stark shouted. 

Thor spread his hands. “Of course they had a language of their own,” he said. “What sentient creature does not? Of course I realize now that I ought to have prepared you for the knowledge, but I did not think this would be a surprise to you." 

"You _knew_ ," Stark hissed. The energy seemed to go out of him, and he sank back into the bed, exhausted. "You knew, and you didn't tell us, and you let us _kill_ them..."

Something cold and sharp seemed to slither down Natasha's spine. "Thor," she demanded, " _what is he talking about?_ "

"The Chitauri," Thor explained, as Simmons reapplied the blood pressure monitor to Stark's finger. "They spoke to each other, during the attack on your city. And now that the Man of Iron has drunk from the Well of Wisdom…”

Clint looked ill. “You mean... Every time he remembers it… in his memories...”

“… They’re talking to him,” Natasha finished for him. 

Clint looked almost as bad as Tony. Natasha knew how he felt. They had all killed Chitauri, some of them in hand-to-hand combat. And those memories would have been bad enough. But to have flown an atomic bomb into their world… to have blown up the mothership…

Stark spoke up from the hospital gurney. "They were alone." He dragged his hands over his scalp. “They were so fucking alone, for so long.” His hands tightened into fists, and he yanked viciously at his hair. “They were a hive-mind, you know? Any time you killed one, all the others felt it. They were _talking_ , we could have _done_ something, negotiated with them, _reasoned_ with them -.”

“There is no reasoning with those who come to conquer and destroy indiscriminately,” Thor insisted. “Talking would have solved nothing. Their goal was extermination.”

 “ – the voices, all the time, surrounded by their voices, but that’s not the worst thing, the worst thing was when. They. All. _Stopped_ -.”

“Oh dear,” Simmons said, as something began beeping at an accelerated rate. “I think you should all leave now.”

Natasha need no prompting to move away from the bed. This wasn’t her field. None of her skills were the kind that could help Stark now. Instead, she looked around. If Thor was here, then _he_ had to be somewhere nearby…

He was.

Loki was lounging against the wall in the corridor outside, like a teenager forced against his will to accompany a parent to the mall. He looked up as the glass door slid open.

"Ah," he said, and stood up away from the wall. "Natalia."

For a long time, Natasha only looked at him. He gazed back at her without speaking.

Did he look pleased, she wondered? Did he look smug? Did he look self-satisfied, as though this was the culmination of a plan whose seeds had been planted long ago?

More importantly, did it really, when you got right down to it, _matter_?

“Come on,” she said at last, and turned away down the corridor, confident that he would follow. “I need a drink.”

//

She was technically still on duty, though, so when they reached the recreation room she went to the mini fridge and pulled out two brands of off-brand soda instead of searching for the Secret Emergency Booze Stash that all SHIELD vehicles had hidden on them somewhere. She handed one to Loki. He didn’t open it, but he did follow her lead and take a seat in the grey Naugahyde armchair when she dropped down onto the sofa.

The coffee table between them could have provided a confirmation for Loki’s alibi, if Natasha had been looking for it. Its surface was completely hidden beneath a thick litter of empty pop cans, plastic forks, and Styrofoam containers gaping open like steamed clams – the mortal remains of the local Chinese restaurant’s Dinner For Ten (Or More). Natasha lifted up crumpled paper napkins until she found a mostly-full order of steamed vegetables and a pair of chopsticks. 

“What _were_ the Chitauri?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Loki turned the can of soda around and around in his hands, pressing each of his palms in turn against its chilled surface. “Casualties of the last Convergence, I suspect.”

The vegetables were cold. Eating them felt like a penance. _And_ someone had gone through and picked out all of the baby corn. “What do you mean?”

“The alignment of the realms doesn’t just create new paths; it destroys them, too. The Chitauri existed in a dimensional dead-end, one that probably _used_ to be connected to the rest of the World Tree, but was cut off as the realms moved back out of alignment after the Convergence, it.” He shrugged. “After that, they were alone. Their sun died, their planet withered, and there was nowhere else they could go – until the Tesseract offered them freedom.”

“Freedom!" Natasha exclaimed. "They all _died_! What kind of freedom is that?”

“I said they were offered freedom, not a future.” Loki set the can of soda down on the floor and leaned forwards to sort through the litter, methodically stacking the empty take-out containers inside one another. “After thousands of years with only the voices inside their heads to listen to, what else did they have to look forwards to? The Tesseract gave them freedom from stagnation, freedom from despair… Freedom from a life lived without hope.”

He moved aside a stack of paper napkins and unearthed, from the very bottom of the pile – miracle of miracles – two spring rolls that had somehow escaped the earlier massacre. He held the container out to Natasha and she speared one on the end of her chopsticks, gladly abandoning the Mixed Chinese Vegetables of Contrition. Her acceptance of this steamed and slightly soggy peace offering (if that’s what it was) seemed to relieve Loki of some of his apprehensions and he added, cheerfully:

“Anyways, those who die in battle are carried off to a glorious afterlife in Valhalla, where there is feasting and carousing and general roistering. It’ll be an improvement for them, really.”

“Oh, _right_.” Natasha bit the end off of the spring roll, still holding it impaled on her chopsticks. It was good… but it _could_ be better. She cast an eye over the crowded coffee table. “So all those dead Chitauri are off laughing it up with a bunch of Asgardian heroes in some enormous banquet hall right now?”

“You’re not allowed to make fun of it Natalia, it’s my religion. That's _discrimination_. What are you looking for?”

“Yeah, good luck getting SHIELD's HR department to touch that one.” She pried the top off another container. It was steamed rice, _again_. “Have you seen the sweet-and-sour sauce? You know, the bright orange stuff -.”

Loki made a face, and reached down into the magazine holder next to the armchair. “You mean _this_? What do you want it for? It’s disgusting. I had to hide it because Thor wouldn’t stop putting it all over _everything_ , including the couch cushions. I hope you have a cleaning staff, by the way.”

Even through the translucent lid, the contents of the Styrofoam container he was holding practically _glowed_. Natasha made grabby-hands at him until he set it down on the coffee table and pushed it over to her.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s delicious,” she informed him, and dunked the entire spring roll inside, prodding it with the chopsticks to submerge it in the glutinous elixir. “… Thanks, by the way.”

“Don’t thank me, I regret giving it to you already,” Loki said. He looked revolted as she took a bite out of the glistening spring roll. “This is worse than watching Thor eat. The two of you should spend more time together, spare the rest of us.”

“Er fo’ _dramatic_ ,” Natasha said with her mouth full. She swallowed. “I _meant_ , for watching my back, when we were in the lab. Not that I needed it, I had the situation completely under control -.”

“Oh, of _course_ ,” he acquiesced, rolling his eyes.

“– but I appreciate it. So. Thanks.” She wiped a drizzle of sauce off her cheek with her thumb and popped it into her mouth. “You’re still going to have to give my knife back, though.”

The air-circulation system kicked in with a hum and a _whoosh_ that rattled the crumpled-up napkins. The paper wrapping Natasha’s chopsticks had come in blew off the table and disappeared somewhere under the Foosball table.

“… Knife?” Loki said, a fraction of a second too late to be convincing. “I don’t know anything about a knife.”

Considering that she was sharing the Globemaster with the kind of degenerates who would eat all the baby corn out of a mixed vegetable assortment, Natasha wasn’t going to lose any sleep over double-dipping. She dropped the spring roll back into the sweet-and-sour sauce and licked her fingers. All was fair in love, war, and communal dining.

“You took it out of my ankle sheath when we were on the floor," she prompted. "Remember?”

“Perhaps you dropped it.”

“I _know_ I didn’t. You’re good,” she admitted, “but you’re not _that_ good.”

Loki’s eyes glittered under the fluorescent lights. One moment, his hand was empty and Natasha had just enough time to wonder if she had gone too far, before there was a knife in it. She hadn't even seen him move.

Casually, he twirled the knife around his fingers and tossed it end-over-end, catching it by the handle as it fell.

“A fine piece of craftsmanship,” he observed. He held it up so he could sight along the blade. “ _Exceptionally_ well-balanced. Quite a deadly little work of art, really.”

"It's custom-made," Natasha told him. She was calm. Her breathing was steady. There was nothing to worry about, and so she wasn't worried. Why would she be? "Hand-crafted."

The steel flashed – and then he leaned forwards, holding the knife out to her by the blade.

“It was only for self-defence,” he said, engagingly.

“Of _course_ it was.” Natasha stood and slipped the knife back into its sheath. There was a mini fridge in the recreation room, with a packet of ice cream bars in the freezer drawer. She crossed the room and tossed one to Loki, who caught it one-handed.

“It’s insulting that you think my actions can be influenced by anything so petty as a system of food rewards,” he complained, but he was tearing open the wrapper as he spoke, so she didn’t take him seriously. “Anyways, I like the one with the white bear on it better.”

“I’ll make a note,” Natasha assured him. She grimaced as he devoured half the ice cream bar in one bite. “ _You’re_ one to talk about gross eating habits. You’re _terrible_.”

“You’re worse,” he retorted. She flipped him off.

“I take it,” he said, after a pause to lick the chocolate off his fingers, “this means I’ve been absolved of wrong-doing?”

Natasha nodded. “The security team says that Tony was alone in the lab after you left with Thor. I have no idea what he thought he was doing, but he must have been the one who plugged in the flux-whatever-o-meter.”

She dropped back down onto the sofa. The motion kicked up a current of air that blew away the aroma of cooking oil and boiled starches that hung over the coffee table, and made her fully aware for the first time of her own stench of ash, burnt plastic, and sweat.

The lab had burned, she remembered. It felt like it had happened days ago. She stared at the detritus of emptied clamshell containers in dismay.

“We’re going to have to start over again,” she realized. “This is a _disaster_.”

Loki didn't share her concern. “You have nothing to worry about, Natalia,” he promised, and grinned - sharp and bright and utterly untrustworthy. “ _I_ have a plan.”

//


End file.
